A course personal growth course, developed by
Werner Erhardt, that was offered in the 70s and 80s.
It eventually developed into what is now the Landmark
Forum.

Expressed Sequence Tag.
A copy of a short segment of RNA (or its reverse complement), usually towards its 3' end. ESTs may be produced a sequenced cheaply and rapidly, by reading them once. An EST is around 400bp long, and in the absence of alternative splicing is supposed to contain enough information to identify the RNA molecule from which it originated.

A public database of ESTs, dbEST, contains > 2 * 106 ESTs.

Problems with this naïve approach:

  • Alternative splicing is more common than was thought.
  • Sequence quality deteriorates along the EST; sometimes the dependable bases are few.
  • It is not known how many types of RNA exist.
  • ESTs may also come from hnRNA (instead of the intended mRNA), and may well be from a non-coding region.

At work, I work on Compugen's LEADS project, which aims (among other things) to reconstruct the original RNA from given ESTs. This is nontrivial.

Est (?), n. & adv.

East.

[Obs.]

Chaucer.

 

© Webster 1913.

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