That spells DNA...

One of my favorite science nerd songs is Jonathan Coulton's "That Spells DNA".

There are a few factual errors in the song.  He states that "each cell has a nucleus", but that is not true.  Red blood cells (erythrocytes) in humans and mammals do not contain nuclei.  That being said, I still love the song.

The following lyrics always make me wish I had a computer nearby so I could see if they were real sequences:

If it says TGGTCGAAC
Then you might get the cancer
If it says GTCACGACAGG
Then you shouldn't eat shrimp or nuts
If it says TATACACATATCCTCGT
Then you'll probably wish that you didn't know

According to JoCo they are made up, saying: "I'm pretty sure that actual important strings of DNA would be too long to put into a song and still have a song that someone might want to listen to."  However, I decided to BLAST the sequences and see if anything came up.  Yes, I am that big of a nerd.

I had to change the BLAST parameters to accomodate the short sequences - notably changing the expect threshold to 5 and the word size to 16.  The first two were still to short for a result.

However, the last matched to the gene Casc1, cancer susceptibility candidate 1.  It's been implicated in mouse lung adenoma.  So, indeed, you probably wish that you didn't know.