Forum:Help with Bioinformatics Course

Question

[deemassh]

We've been given an assignment relating to Entrez and I need some help with confirming my answer to one of the questions under the mRNA section.

Question: "How many records do you expect to get if you look for MLH1? How many do you get? Why?"

It builds on the question listed above it, which reads: "How many records do we get if we look for colon cancer in the Nucleotide Database?"

If you look up colon cancer in the Nucleotide database, 62734 search results will be generated. If you look up MLH1in the Nucleotide database, 22760 search results will be generated. To answer the question "How many records do you expect to get if you look for MLH1? How many do you get? Why?" I expected the search results for MLH1 to be less than the search results for colon cancer. The rationale behind my answer is that MLH1 is linked to colon cancer, so the 62734 search results of colon cancer included the 22760 results of MLH1.

I'm confused about how I should answer the question considering I'm unsure sure that you could compare the number of search results for "colon cancer" (which occurs in mammals) vs that of " MLH1" (which occurs in most organisms). Maybe it might be comparable if those search terms also contain "AND Human[ORGN]"?

I'd appreciate any help in verifying or expanding my answer.

Answer 1

[Mensur Dlakic]

This forum is not meant for helping with homework assignments. Helping you would undermine the learning structure your instructor has set up for the students, because you are supposed to arrive at answers on your own. If you were to get comments from 10 people here - you won't - and incorporate that into your assignment, it wouldn't be ethical either because you would likely get a higher grade. The same goes for your other post with a similar topic.

I suggest you communicate with your instructor directly if you have questions about your assignment.