[Biopython-dev] selenocysteines

[Iddo Friedberg]

On Sun, 15 Jul 2001, Andrew Dalke wrote:

: Hey all,
:
: Just noticed ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/gbrel.txt says:
:
:
: >Selenocysteine residues within the protein translations of coding
: > region features have been represented in GenBank via the letter 'X'
: > and a /transl_except qualifier. At the May 1999 DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank
: > collaborative meeting, it was learned that IUPAC plans to adopt the
: > letter 'U' for selenocysteine.
:
: Any knowledge on if that has occured.
:

Well, I looked at Swiss-Prot's FDHF_ECOLI, which contains selenocysteine
in position 140. (Just to make things even happier: SwissProt marks this
with a "C"). Moseying on to M13563, one of 3 pointed to GenBank enries, I
indeed found an 'X' in the position the Selenocysteine. Same thing for the
E.coli chromosome file (U0006) and the (what appears to be) a contig.

Guess the switch hasn't happened yet.

Iddo


--

Iddo Friedberg                                  | Tel: +972-2-6758647
Dept. of Molecular Genetics and Biotechnology   | Fax: +972-2-6757308
The Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School | email: idoerg at cc.huji.ac.il
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