Essential Idea:
Bioinformatics is the use of computers to
analyse sequence data in biological research
Understandings:
- Databases allow scientists easy access to information
- The body of data stored in databases is increasing exponentially
- BLAST searches can identify similar sequences in different organisms
- Gene function can be studied using model organisms with similar sequences
- Sequence alignment software allows comparison of sequences from different organisms
- BLASTn allows nucleotide sequence alignment while BLASTp allows protein alignment
- Databases can be searched to compare newly identified sequences with sequences of known function in other organisms
- Multiple sequence alignment is used in the study of phylogenetics
- EST is an expressed sequence tag that can be used to identify potential genes
Applications:
- Use of knockout technology in mice to determine gene function
- Discovery of genes by EST data mining
Skills:
- Explore chromosome 21 in databases (for example in Ensembl)
- Use of software to align two proteins
- Use of software to construct simple cladograms and phylograms of related organisms using DNA sequences