Online Search Exercise Name__________________________ Date_______________
VBS Home page,Genetics Home page, Previous Page, Next Page
Learning goal:
Demonstrate that you can access various biology data bases through the NCBI portal
Develop at least two possible ideas for your genetics project.
Go to the National Center for Biotechnology Web site http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ and answer the following questions this web site using the computers in the CASE classroom. You might find it useful to cut and paste the questions into your favorite word processor and then just type your answers for me. You may deliver your answers to my e-mail address as a text file rather than print them out. Each person should do there own work as there may be several different places you could go via the NCBI site to find the answers. Put your answer in your own words. Do not cut and paste wording from the site. Cut and paste this into your word processing program and fill in the answers.
Remember to keep a hard copy of your work and an electronic copy for your own use.
Cite a link or reference for each answer to indicate where you found it. Also indicate what database you accessed (e.g omim, pubmed etc you accessed to find your answer)
First 9 questions are worth 2 points each; Project start is worth 10 points.
1. What is bioinformatics and what are the main areas that bioinformatics deals with?
2. What are Expressed Sequence Tags and what can they be used to do?
3. What is an SNP and what are they used for? (2 points)
4. What is BLAST and what sorts of information could you obtain using BLAST?
5. What is Plasmodium falciparum and in what Database would you look to find the sequence of its DNA?
6. What is Friedreich's ataxia and what is its mode of inheritance?
7. What are Orthologous sequences?
8. What is green fluorescent protein used for? Hint: Find a citation that talks about green fluorescent mice. (No joke)
9. What is Williams Syndrome and what is its mode of inheritance?
10. Briefly state possible project ideas following the instructions below (10 points)
Your project may cover any area of genetics of interest to you. The focus may be on the degree to which genes influence a particular human disease or disorder, may be a topic in biotechnology of interest to you, or could be on some aspect of genetics related to evolution or ecology. If you choose to do a problem related to medicine, unless the treatment for the disease involves some sort of gene therapy, your focus should be on the genetics of the disorder not its treatment. The goal of this project is to you to prepare an online presentation either using html or powerpoint that to be shared with the entire class and possibly other people as well.
Present several ideas (at least two) for your project this Thursday. For each idea write a brief paragraph explaining the problem you want to look at along with a web link (http://.....) either on from the NCBI site or some other site that discusses the problems. Also use Pub Med to get a print citation of a paper related to each problem For now you need not look up the actual print article, just provide the citation. After looking your ideas over I will meet with each of you individually to help you refine and focus your idea so you don't "bite off more than you can chew".
pgd 09/16/03 revised 32/21/05