milosav@SPICA.UCSC.EDU (Aleksandar Milosavljevic) (10/20/90)
The following is an abstract that (by mistake) did not appear in the Proceedings of the Biomatrix 90 Workshop. I hope at least some of you will find it useful. -Aleksandar Milosavljevic HUMAN ALU SEQUENCE IDENTIFICATION VIA ELECTRONIC MAIL by Aleksandar Milosavljevic and Jerzy Jurka, Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, and Pat Monardo, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories The identification program is based on our current paper (J.Jurka and A.Milosavljevic, Reconstruction and Analysis of Human Alu Genes, J. Mol. Evol., to appear) where we propose that Alu sequences are mostly pseudogenes retroposed from a set of biologically active Alu genes. Severel subfamilies of Alu sequences, named J, Sb, Sc, Sx, Sp, and Sq, have been retroposed from particular genes, or closely related sets of genes. In its present form, the program reads the incoming electronic mail message that contains an Alu sequence, aligns it against the Alu consensus and then examines the diagnostic positions for the presence of bases characteristic for the particular Alu subfamilies. A short output file containing the results is then mailed back to the sender. To obtain detailed information about the input format and the current status of our program, please send a message containing the single word "help" to the Internet address pythia@cis.ucsc.edu. For questions and suggestions, contact pythia-admin@cis.ucsc.edu. We gratefully acknowledge Prof. David Haussler from the Baskin Center for Computer and Information Sciences, UC Santa Cruz for his support of this project.