I'm an undergraduate, and I have finished my courses in biochemistry and clinical genetics. Although I'm sure this basic question has been asked and answered several times before, I cannot form this question into a searchable query that matches any satisfactory answer neither in google nor this message board so please forgive me for asking.
Anyway, my question is this. The genome is often presented as a single long string eg: http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgGateway follow the link, press submit, and in the assembly page, press base(right to zoom in) or download a reference genome from http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg19/chromosomes/ Lets visualize chromosome number 7 as so, chr7.fa 5' --AAAATTTT-----GGGGCCC>3' : lets call this one A 3' <-TTTTAAAA-----CCCCGGG5' : and this one B Thus, If my understanding is correct, the chr7 can be presented as either the string that constitutes A or B. Though they are complementary, presented from 5'->3' they would none the less be different (I checked: chr7 is not one large palindrome). So the genomic strands presented in the above links would can only be A or B. (that is, they are either presenting AAAATTTT -----GGGGCCC(A) or GGGCCCC AAAATTTT(B)) Lets assume that what we are seeing is A *But how is it determined that which of the two should be the one presented? * *In other words who chose A over B? Is it just a historical preference?* * * * * P.S Sense(antisense) is AFAICT irrelevant here. _______________________________________________ Genome maillist - [email protected] https://lists.soe.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/genome
