^ Nice Peter. You win the prize!
I'll have to read those sites.
Unfortunately we can't be sure that these DNA segments are 'in frame' becasue for a start they aren't multiples of three. Being a protein person (which is the business end of gene function) I want to translate those sequences into amino-acids.
Summary
CGTGGT
GACCCCTT Antigen A
CGT
CGT
CACC
GCT
A Antigen B
CGTGGT
-ACCCCTT Antigen O
I'll try and find out if these are exonic. O is a frame shift and obvioulsy causes the protein fragment to not translate or not fold.
I don't want to sidetrack too much away from the fascinating basic science here, but, from a creationist POV I would like to suggest that these SNPs are easy to imagine occurring in a short time even if there was only one initial allele. I would also suggest that the protein fold would be unchanged (the full gene would be probably be thousands of bases long) except for O where it is either unexpressed or doesn't fold. From a genomic/structural biology POV alleles are just varieties of a protein and as such, if still functional, wold be expected to have the same protein fold.
Does anybody know what phenotype OO people have? This gene may be semi-redundant but it's conservation suggests it is not completely redundant.
Note that O is essentially identical to A but with a frameshift causing lack of expression or folding. So blood type can be thought of as having 2 functional alleles and 1 non-functional.
PS - if they are in frame, and exonic, then the amino acid sequences of the first 12 bases is:
RGDP A
RRHR B
RGTP O (with the rest frameshifted including the stop codon)
The seqeunce of B is quite different from A. R =Arginine is very diff to G=Glycine. D=Aspartic Acid is charged as is H=Histidine. P=Proline is very diff to R=Arginine.
Note that the remaining hundreds of amino-acids of A and B will be identical and hence the proteins almost definietely have the same fold. The functions of A and B would have near identical functions and the primary difference is probably in immunological reactions due to antibody binding to these proteins.
[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 07-23-2002]