Exploring Important Biological Concepts Using Biology Workbench

 

Mary Ball, Stacey Kiser, and Garry Duncan

Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2002, Volume 23

Abstract

This set of three activities uses Biology Workbench, a website that brings together sequence databases and online software for searching databases, aligning sequences, and creating inferred phylogenetic trees. The first two activities explore the diversity of preproinsulin sequences across species. Students use the Student Version of Biology Workbench and search databases by keyword in the first activity, while, in the second, students use the actual Biology Workbench and search the databases using a sequence. The third activity illustrates how an alignment created with Workbench can be used to color-code a 3-D model of a protein using the online software Protein Explorer.

Keywords:  DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, protein sequencing

University of Chicago (2001)