Last month we mentioned the challenges of studying blue whales in a laboratory setting. If we want to know what a particular gene or protein does in an animal that large, we often have to rely on inference based on what a comparable gene or protein does in an animal we can study more readily like a mouse. And how do we know which protein is comparable--or homologous, to use the more technical term? Typically the search for homologous proteins starts with a sequence similarity scan, a check of an entire library of … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Finding the Proteins of Theseus