Introduction to Bioinformatics - COIN81
Assignment One - Bioinformatics Webquest
Your first assignment is a tour of bioinformatics sites, a sort of "treasure hunt" using your Web browser and the Internet to navigate the Genome. You will visit ten sites, all linked below, and perform some guided searches while you explore. The tour is intended to be fun, so to ease any apprehension you may have on the first assignment, just follow the directions and you'll do just fine. There is a target gene for this exercise, COMT (Catechol-O-Methyl Transferase), but if you have a key gene of your liking - please feel free to follow that.
The tour covers the following sites:
NCBI - NCBI National Center for Biotechnology Information, which includes PubMed, GenBank, BLAST, and Structure.
UniProt - UniProt contains SWISS-PROT Protein knowledgebase and the TrEMBL Computer-annotated supplement to Swiss-Prot.
PIR - Protein Information Resource.
Pfam
- Protein families database of alignments and HMMs. (We will do a few exercises
here).
PDB - Worldwide repository for the processing and distribution of 3-D biological macromolecular structure data.
GeneCards - Database of human genes, their products and their involvement in diseases.
KEGG - Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes.
The start of the tour begins with NCBI. Follow each step, and just keep a Word document open that you can copy and paste results into. You don't need a particularly long (or large) document as a deliverable. Just "report interesting findings". Another hint - be prepared to try each section a few times before it gets comfortable. So practice each step before writing down your experiences - it's the journey that counts!
Start assignment one by following the webquest.htm guided tour. Plan for about 10 to 20 hours, and break it up into sections. It is not unusual to repeat sections to gain familiarity with the process of navigating data.
Click here to return to the course outline.