Download bushmeat

APES- Bushmeat DNA Blast Assignment
Name: Lali Farias
Backstory: Imagine you are working with conservationists in Cameroon. You want to help them
identify potential poachers and help them to enforce local poaching laws. You need to identify
which vendors are selling the poached meat but it is in pieces and hard to identify the species
by sight- what do you do?
Instructions:
1: Using the DNA Blast Program- http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi
type in the DNA sequence into the nucleotide blast. Choose the “Nucleotide blast”. Under
Database, make sure to choose “other”.
2: Using the results from the blast, type the organism name into google to find out what
organism you have. (Common Name)
Sample #A62498: Sitatunga
Sample #B77342: African bushed tail porcupine
Sample #C79942: olive baboon
Sample #C80217: African Bush Elephant
Sample #C90034: Drill
Sample #D51210: western gorilla
Sample #G34176: Pressus's monkey
Sample #G54358: greater cane rat
Sample #H64991: western red colobus
Sample #I38722: peters's duiker
Sample #K28831: jentink's duiker
Sample #N51683: tragelaphus
Conclusion: Why is it important to know the genome of an organism? How does it help us to
identify endangered and threatened species?
It's important to know the genome of organisms because it can tell a lot of about the meat we
can be consuming. In this case there could be threatened species that are being hunted
although it being illegal. Figuring out what kind they are by their genomes could help those
endangered species. Red meat looks similar and can be sold regardless of its not allowed but
identifying the exact species would track down hunters and people threatening the species and
could help the species grow.