Exercise 1: Submission of a protein coding gene

1a. Adding GenBank fields to your document

The sequence Sppu-UZ is a partial sequence of a Major Histocompatibility Complex gene. It was isolated from the genomic DNA of Sphenodon punctatus (tuatara), a reptile native to New Zealand.

This portion of the tutorial will take you through the steps required to prepare the annotated gene sequence, Sppu-UZ, for submission to GenBank.

This first step involves adding general information about the sequence, including a description of the sequence, information about the source organism, tissue type, geographic location, sampling dates, etc.  All GenBank submissions require this information.

To add this information, select the sequence in the Document table, then click the Info button in the document viewer panel. In the Properties tab you can add information about your sequence which can then be mapped to a GenBank field in the submission tool.




You will see that Name:, Description: and Molecule Type: are already entered. Add the organism to this document by clicking on Organism: and typing "Sphenodon punctatus".




You can add additional information to map to GenBank fields by clicking Add meta data and choosing GenBank Submission as the meta-data type.




The default fields allow you to add information about the specimen from which the sequence was derived. These fields do not all have to be filled in if they are not relevant to your sample, and you can add additional fields as required.

For this sequence we want to add a sequence ID and some information on the sample that the sequence was derived from, but we don't require information on the sampling locality. The Sequence ID should be a unique identifier that allows each sequence to be identified at all steps in the submission process before a unique accession number is assigned. It must not contain any gaps. In this case we will use the allele name, so click on Sequence ID and type Sppu-UZ03.  Under Specimen Voucher type NZFT1234. This is the reference number for the blood sample that the sequence was derived from.

To add information on the tissue type we will add an additional field. Click Edit meta-data types, ensure GenBank Submission is selected, and click the + sign next to the Collected By text. This will bring up a blank box as in the screenshot below. Type "Tissue Type" in here and click OK.




Then in the Info window click Tissue type and enter "Blood". Leave the other fields blank and click Save.





Exercise 1 continues.