AIM

The aim of this exercise is to familiarise yourself with some of the major portals of bioinformatics data available on the internet. The attraction of using internet-based analysis programs is that they are free and readily accessible. In these tutorials we will only touch on a very small subset of what is available - sites are continually created, updated and disbanded.

One of the most popular bioinformatics “front pages”, the NCBI site run by the National Institute of Health in the US. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ This is an excellent way to query a variety of databases, all of which are interlinked via internal NCBI links. Of course, all the databases have their own “home” site, which you can look at as well. Some of these are:

Nucleotide

GenBank https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/

DDBJ https://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/

EMBL https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/home

Protein

SWISS-PROT https://www.expasy.org/resources/uniprotkb-swiss-prot

PIR https://proteininformationresource.org/

UniProt https://www.uniprot.org/

Structure

PDB https://www.rcsb.org/

This introductory tutorial is set up as an interactive “step-through” session, posing questions along the way that you should think about. Work through at your own pace, and feel free to become sidetracked - that’s how you learn what is available! Have a look around the home pages of the databases above, click on the some of the links to see what they offer.

Some of the general techniques that you learn here will be used throughout your course