What is DNAme?

DNAme is an application for teaching/learning purposes which converts a word to a DNA sequence. It has some theory to understand the processes underlying this conversion, but this theroy must not be used with teaching puroposes because it may have some inaccuracies.

How DNAme works?

Summary

DNAme was designed using R/Shiny that takes your name as a sequence of one-letter aminoacids and converts them to DNA/mRNA by looking for the codon that codes for each aminoacid.

One-letter code for aminoacids

Since most aminoacids are coded by more than one codon, it takes the codon usage of several species into account, selecting the most frequent codon based on [genescript](https://www.genscript.com/)'s [codon frequency tables](https://www.genscript.com/tools/codon-frequency-table). Currently the available organisms are human and mouse, but the idea is to have some of the most used model organisms (i.e. *A. thaliana*, *D. melanogaster*, *E. coli*, ...).

Not all names

It has to be taken into account that not all names can be converted to DNA/mRNA, because not all letters have an associated aminoacid. Hence, if a letter in your name is not possible, DNAme will throw an error message. You have two possibilites:

• Choose another word, such as a nickname or a surname.

• Play with phonetics. For example, if your name contains an *X* you could change it by a combination of letters with a similar sound like *KS*, which are *Lysine* and *Serine*.

Parameters

*DNAme* allows to select diverse parameters:

• Nucleic acid: DNA or mRNA

• Organism (for the codon usage): Human or Mouse

• Separator: character to separate the codons (i.e. a dash, a blank space, nothing).

• *in the future* Use extra letters.

Availability

*DNAme* is available [here](https://biobit.netlify.app/dname.html) as a working application. This version is deployed to shinyapps.io and only one person at a time can be connected to the app.

To download the source code, go to the [Github repository](https://github.com/amitjavilaventura/DNAme) and clone it. Then open R or RStudio, go to the *DNAme* directory (with `setwd()`) and run `shiny::runApp("app.R")` in the R console. In this case you will need to install some R packages:

• `shiny` `dplyr` `magrittr` `stringr`

In the future, I want to build it as a Desktop app using `photon`, but at the moment, this option is not available.