We needed to find drosophila analogs to the genes high on our list, so this week, we built a program that converts human gene names to human protein ID numbers from the NCBI. Then, the ID number is put into BLAST, a tool from the NCBI that sorts drosophila proteins by amino residue sequence similarity.
There are also things we can do to optimize the gene ranker program to improve the run time. We will be converting some sets to integers and will catalog the runtime versus the progress.