Question

Which of the following is untrue regarding the drawbacks of expressed sequence tags (ESTs)?

(a) They are often of lowquality because they are automatically generated without verification

(b) Many bases are ambiguously determined, represented by N’s

(c) Frame shift errors and artifactual stop codons are some common errors

(d) Despite of all the failures, the translation the sequences is smooth

Answer 1

The correct choice is (d) Despite of all the failures, the translation the sequences is smooth

To explain: Common errors also include frameshift errors and artifactual stop codons, resulting in failures of translating the sequences. In addition, there is often contamination by vector sequence, introns (fromunspliced RNAs), ribosomal RNA (rRNA), mitochondrial RNA, among others. ESTs represent only partial sequences of genes.