Hi. I'm working on a simple bioinformatics project and I had a very simple (embarrassingly so) question. If I know the percentage of adenine and thymine in a double stranded DNA molecule, could the amount of guanine and cytosine each be a decimal answer with a non-zero mantissa? Example: 34.2% for each nucleotide? Thank you. [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Hi, On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 3:28 AM, Caitlin <bioprogrammer at="" gmail.com=""> wrote: > Hi. > > I'm working on a simple bioinformatics project and I had a very simple > (embarrassingly so) question. If I know the percentage of adenine and > thymine in a double stranded DNA molecule, could the amount of guanine and > cytosine each be a decimal answer with a non-zero mantissa? Example: 34.2% > for each nucleotide? This is the wrong place for these types of questions -- you'll probably have better luck with such general questions on biostars.org -- although, if you're asking about homework, I guess you should show reasonable attempts to get to the answer and be specific about where you are confused. That having been said, I'm confused about what you are trying to ask. The ACGTs in your sequence should add up to 100%, so the mantissa will be whatever it will be ... not sure why you think there are any constraints on the mantissa, assuming there is no precondition that there must be equally as many As, Cs, Gs, and Ts in the sequence, or something. -steve -- Steve Lianoglou Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center | Weill Medical College of Cornell University Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact