Tutorials

Exploring with microarrays: how do plants respond to drought?

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:43:49 -0700

Microarray and Next Generation DNA sequencing technologies are giving us new abilities to understand how living things respond to environmental change. One of the ways we can use this new information is to study gene expression under different conditions. In this activity, we will explore microarray data from plants as they experience drought.

1. View background information for the data set.
2. Download the instructions (available soon).
3. Instructors may obtain a set of questions for students to answer and an updated answer key (available soon).
4. Microarray data have been pre-loaded and partially analyzed using GeneSifter Analysis Edition (Geospiza, Inc.)

An introduction to Entrez

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:24:23 -0800

This six and half minute video shows how to find out the kind of information that’s stored in each of the NCBI databases.

Learn how to:
• find the database fields
• use the database index
• obtain metadata for a certain type of information, for example, the number of human proteins in GenBank

An introduction to Cn3D

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:05:38 -0800

This five and half minute video introduces basic skills for using Cn3D. You will learn how to:
• make structures larger or smaller
• move structures across the screen
• change the color
• change the drawing style
• view selected parts of a structure
• annotate parts of structures

An introduction to bioinformatics

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:17:20 -0800

This six minute video describes some of the history of bioinformatics. The NIH defines bioinformatics as the:

Research, development, or application of computational tools and approaches for expanding the use of biological, medical, behavioral or health data,
including those to acquire, store, organize, archive, analyze, or visualize such data.

http://www.bisti.nih.gov

BLAST for Beginners

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:36:44 -0800

BLAST for beginners introduces students to blastn, a commonly used tool for comparing nucleotide sequences (DNA and RNA). This popular tutorial shows how to do a blast search with a nucleotide sequence, highlights some of the information that can be found in the search results and shows how to interpret some of that information, like the E value and alignment scores.

The complete set of materials consists of:
1. The BLAST for beginners tutorial.
2. A set of unknown sequences.
3. A set of questions for students to answer.
1. Instructors may obtain an updated answer key here.

Funding for this project was provided by the National Science Foundation's Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement Program under grants DUE-0088153 and DUE-0127599, also from Bio-Link, an NSF Advanced Technology Education Center.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.