Analyzing protein sequences

Question

[smithkthedale]

I am new at bioinformatics trying to find out how/what resources to use and what program to use to do a comparative analysis on protein sequences (these are in a fasta form...they have just a bunch of letters - which I am guessing code to the protein). I wanna know questions like how many sequences have mutations (for example missing an amino acid) - so essentially looking at the change in residues/how many active sites they have.

I have four sequences: one human sequence, and three other mammal sequences.

Anyone have any suggestions on the best way to go about this? Any kind of workflow?

Any help would be much appreciated! Will leave like.

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

search for MSA: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/msa/

Answer 1

[M.O.L.S]

You could use R or Python to compare the FASTA files. If you wanted you could write your own program. If you want to do it in R there is a Biostrings library that you can use to compare your files. Otherwise if you want to do it in python you could read the files and get the sequences, then use string methods to compare the string variables (which would be your sequences).