Say the nucleotide designator is:
ataacgctttaggg

Use this to count the 'a' characters:
=LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"a",""))

Use this to count the 'c' and 'g' characters:
=LEN(A1)*2-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"c",""))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"g",""))

Finally, use this to count all 'a' characters in a range (say A1:A3):
=SUM(LEN(A1:A3)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1:A3,"a","")))
This function needs to be entered with ctrl + shift + enter (not just enter)


Regards,
Ryan---
--
RyGuy


"Dave Peterson" wrote:

ps. If you want to make the count case-insensitive (ASDF and aSdF and asdf are
all the same):

=(len(a1)-len(substitute(upper(a1),upper(b1),"")))/len(b1)

ty wrote:

Here are 5000 or so genes for a bacterial genome listed in my Excell 2007.
There are two columns. col (1) lists the gene names and col(2) lists the
corresponding nucleotides sequence like ATTCGGGG.....

is there a simple way to count the number of nucleotides (characters) in
each cell?

--

Dave Peterson