Bring Bioinformatics to Your Biology Classroom

Overview

This is a completed Faculty Mentoring Network (FMN). FMNs are sustained, immersive, community-based professional development opportunities for faculty. FMNs support the adaptation and implementation of materials and/or instructional approaches in their classrooms. Learn more about FMNs.

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Bring Bioinformatics to Your Biology Classroom

Using bioinformatics strategies to solve biology problems in introductory courses

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Goals

integrate bioinformatics exercises into introductory biology classrooms
introduce students to essential, and critically important bioinformatics concepts and competencies including tools and algorithms that accomplish multiple sequence alignment, BLAST, and generation of distance trees (phylograms)

Mentors

Sam Donovan, University of Pittsburgh
Adam Kleinschmit, Adams State University
William Tapprich, University of Nebraska-Omaha

Final Products

Featured Resource of the Week

Sequence Similarity in Developmental Biology - A Bioinformatics Exercise Using Myostatin

Barbara Murdoch

Version: 1.0 Adapted From: Sequence Similarity: An inquiry based and "under the hood" approach for incorporating molecular sequence alignment in introductory undergraduate biology courses v5.0

This exercise leads upper level biology majors in an inquiry-based excursion to determine how similar the signaling molecule, myostatin, is between humans and mice, using a basic set of bioinformatics tools and concepts.

1.1K

2.2K

06.2019

Featured Resource of the Week

Bioinformatics: Investigating Sequence Similarity - A Plant Biology Approach

Ami Erickson

Version: 1.0 Adapted From: Sequence Similarity: An inquiry based and "under the hood" approach for incorporating molecular sequence alignment in introductory undergraduate biology courses v5.0

This laboratory module is a modification of the original published on CourseSource with a focus on plant biology. In the final activity, students conduct a BLAST to compare histone protein sequences between Arabidopsis, moss and yeast.

phylogenetics, bioinformatics, sequencing, FASTA, NCBI, plant biology, NIBLSE, algorithms, incubators, Plant and Fungal Evolution, BLAST, multiple sequence alignment, CourseSource, phylogram

2.0K

1.5K

05.2019

Featured Resource of the Week

Sequence Similarity Resource Adaptation: Exploring Ebola Virus

William Tapprich

Version: 1.0 Adapted From: Sequence Similarity: An inquiry based and "under the hood" approach for incorporating molecular sequence alignment in introductory undergraduate biology courses v5.0

This adaptation of the sequence similarity resource provides biology students with a basic set of bioinformatics concepts and tools. These concepts and tools are used to explore relationships between Ebola virus strains.

phylogenetics, bioinformatics, Ebola, sequencing, FASTA, NCBI, NIBLSE, algorithms, incubators, BLAST, multiple sequence alignment, CourseSource, phylogram

1.9K

5.0K

05.2019