Kraig Biocraft Laboratories Inc (KBLB)

[jazz710]

Figure 1? Figure 1 is an amino acid alignment of the silk proteins from three species of orb-weaving spiders. Each letter represents a specific amino acid (building blocks of proteins coded for by 3 DNA nucleotides) and a gap (-) in an alignment means that the amino acid is not present in all species. By aligning the sequences by areas of similarity, one can start to figure out how well conserved a protein (or its corresponding DNA) might be.

Just eyeballing this from a bioinformatics framework, which is what I do all day, these sequences are fairy divergent (not conserved).

For what it's worth, and it's really NOT worth much, these diagrams could be made much clearer with better visualizers. A major problem with disseminating scientific data to the non-scientific public is poor visualization/communication. Part of my work is trying to show how this type of data can be presented clearly and logically to anyone, even grade school students. It's astounding what some graphic design can do.