Chapter 34 : Exploring Bioinformatics

Abstract:

The availability of molecular information and relatively easy means of analyzing it have led to the coining of a new word: bioinformatics. The activities in this chapter provide the user with an introduction to it. This chapter is meant to open a door for the user, and talks about performing a basic local alignment search tool (BLAST) search to identify amylase source organisms. In this activity, the user uses the search tool BLAST to identify the source organisms of the amylase sequences. The databases are constantly growing through the addition of new information. The BLAST searches described in this chapter uses only portions of the amylase sequences. The chapter talks about exploring protein bioinformatics resources in more depth, using human pancreatic amylase as the example protein. It also talks about exploring online biomedical literature references and its procedure.