In genetics, a chimera is a single cDNA sequence originating from two transcripts. It is usually considered to be a contaminant in transcript and expressed sequence tag (EST) databases. It is estimated that approximately 1% of all transcripts in the National Center for Biotechnology Information's Unigene database contain a "chimeric sequence".
Methods have been devised to detect them, such as the Ribosomal Database Project's CHECK_CHIMERA program. However, in protein engineering, "chimeragenesis (forming chimeras between proteins that are encoded by homologous cDNAs)" is one of the "two major techniques used to manipulate cDNA sequences".
Examples
References
Chimera (EST) Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA