If nothing else, Dr. Snail is creative. Mostly, he uses his powers for the forces of evil/hippieness though. Still, he decided to throw us a bone and came up with this little gem:
The Mark of Cain The Yeti
Recently, a group of scientists announced they had created a synthetic genome. The creators of the synthetic genome inserted ‘words’ into the amino acid sequence of the genome to serve as ‘watermarks’. Of course, all of those words were mere advertisements for the people and lab that created the genome (damn you Venter). This prompted science blogger Carl Zimmer to ask “What if evolution has produced sequences of DNA that happen to form words?” Now don’t go looking for ‘God’ in the sequences because you won’t find him (There’s no letter ‘O’ in the amino acid alphabet). In taking up the challenge, I searched for something near and dear to Dr. Yeti’s readers, the yeti taint. Searching for sequences containing the string YETITAINT revealed the mighty yeti leaving his sweaty mark across many organisms.
In humans, YETITAINT shows up in a protein associated with Sanfilippo syndrome, a terrible disease but interestingly causes those infected to grow coarse hair.
The following are a few other species which have YETITAINT in their DNA.
Cryptococcus neoformans is an encapsulated yeast-like fungus.
Anopheles gambiae the malaria carrying mosquito.
Trichomonas vaginalis, a protozoan which causes an STD called Trichomoniasis which has symptoms that include “heavy, yellow-green or gray vaginal discharge.”
Drosophila pseudoobscura a damn dirty fruit fly. Apparently this fruit fly is falsely obscure (?) according to the species name.
Shewanella woodyi, a glowing bacteria isolated from squid ink.
More Random Bacteria - Corynebacterium efficiens, Geobacter uraniireducens, Bacillus selenitireducens, Silicibacter pomeroyi
I believe this demonstrates the mystical power of the yeti to spread his taint across all forms of life, right down to the molecular level.
Kudos Dr. Snail, kudos.
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