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ABLE 2007: University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY June 5-9. Host: Ruth Beattie
E-mail: rebeat1@uky.edu
Major Workshops
Thursday June 8
Robert J. Kosinski, Clemson University
An Introduction to Bioinformatics
This laboratory introduces several simple bioinformatics techniques suitable
for freshman biology: using BLAST to identify proteins and DNA sequences, evaluating
the closeness of a BLAST match using the E value, determining basic information
about a protein in the Swiss-Prot database and in databases linked to
it, researching a medical or molecular topic using PubMed, using Clustal W
to do molecular phylogenetic comparisons, and finding and exploring online
genomes (ranging from viral to human) using both the NCBI Genomes page and
Ensembl. The final, capstone exercise asks the students to use their skills
to determine if DNA samples isolated from some simulated patients after a mass
illness give evidence of a bioterror attack. If so, the students report on
the bioterror disease they discovered. If no bioterrorism is found, they report
on normally-occurring pathogenic organisms they found in the patients. All
the amino acid and DNA data files necessary for the exercises are downloaded
from a Clemson Web site. This laboratory has been used for two years in the
introductory biology course for majors at Clemson University.
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