The Gene Gateway Workbook

U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Updated: 10/05/2004
HFE record in GenAtlas:
3. Examine the HFE record. As you scroll down the page you will notice that there are at least
11 variants for this gene. We saw this before when we were using Entrez Gene. Multiple
mRNA variants for a gene indicate alternative splicing, which involves splicing the same
mRNA transcript different ways to produce different proteins. For example, an exon included in
one variant may be spliced out with the introns in another variant. Multiple protein products
can be generated from alternative splicing of the same mRNA. We will examine only the first
variant (NM_000410), which is the largest (7 exons), most inclusive splice variant for
HFE.
4. Click on see the exons for the first variant. This will take you to a page providing a colorcoded
breakdown of the DNA sequence of each exon (see the screenshot on the following
page). The blue bases are adjacent intronic DNA. Note that only portions of the intron
sequence adjacent to the exons are shown. Much of the intronic DNA sequence has been
left out. Start and stop codons are in red. The bases of the exon sequence are capitalized in
black. Bold portions of the exon sequence make up the coding sequence, and the unbolded
portions do not code for protein.
Gene Gateway: A Web Companion to the Human Genome Landmarks Poster
www.DOEgenomes.org/genegateway
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