Question: How do you anilize DNA

Melissa Wilson Sayres answered on 26 Apr 2016:

We analyze DNA in many different ways, but all of them using a computer. Sometimes we take the DNA sequences (A’s, T’s, G’s, and C’s) of one species and compare them to other species to see what changes occurred over long evolutionary time. Other times we compare the DNA sequences between individuals in the same species (humans!) to study human population-specific variation.

Specifically to do this, we can read in a text file that has all the DNA in it (a long string of letters), align those letters across species or across individuals, then use programs to identify where the similarities and differences are.