Engaging students in a bioinformatics activity to introduce gene structure and function

Authors

Barbara J. May, College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-2013

Disciplines

Bioinformatics | Biology | Genomics | Higher Education | Molecular Genetics | Science and Mathematics Education

Abstract

Bioinformatics spans many fields of biological research and plays a vital role in mining and analyzing data. Therefore, there is an ever-increasing need for students to understand not only what can be learned from this data, but also how to use basic bioinformatics tools. This activity is designed to provide secondary and undergraduate biology students to a hands-on activity meant to explore and understand gene structure with the use of basic bioinformatic tools. Students are provided an “unknown” sequence from which they are asked to use a free online gene finder program to identify the gene. Students then predict the putative function of this gene with the use of additional online databases.

Comments

DOI: 10.1128/jmbe.v14i1.496

Copyright Statement

©2013 Barbara J. May. Published by the American Society for Microbiology. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the a Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use and distribution, provided the original work is properly cited.

Recommended Citation

May BJ. 2013. Engaging students in a bioinformatics activity to introduce gene structure and function. Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education 14(1): 107-109.