Using the Bioinformatics Tools at NCBI

Course Summary

Established in 1988 in the USA as an information resource centre for molecular biology, NCBI consolidates several established bioinformatics software tools and hosts most of the major public sequence databases. The seamless linkage between these is a major asset of the site. Amongst its repertoire are;

1. Entrez - a text retrieval system for searching a series of linked databases containing sequence annotation and bibliographic records.
2. Blast - a multifunctional sequence search engine - boasting a sophisticated graphical interface for viewing results.
3. Omim - a catalogue of human genes and genetic disorders linked to the major datasets.

Course content

• Getting to the NCBI web site
• Finding a gene of interest using a text search
• Finding a gene of interest using a sequence
• Viewing the chromosomal location of a gene
• Exporting data from the NCBI database
• Expanding your horizons with 'Neighbours'

Pre-requisites

People coming on the course should be familiar with how to use a web browser.

A (very) basic understanding of eukaryotic gene structure will be assumed

Related Courses

• Exploring the Ensembl genome databases
• Comparing genomic sequences using ACT