The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI, aka "the mothership") is the starting point for many web-based biology sessions (though there are many more web-servers and databases out there). However, the "everything in one portal" approach often isn't the right approach for teaching.
A quick example:
- You have just received some sequence data from your shiny new automatic sequencer.
- What is it?
- We can run a BLAST sequence similarity search against a database of known sequences to find out.
- What does it look like?
- The RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB) is the repository of macromolecular structures. They happen to have a "Molecule of the Month" feature about our mystery molecule.
- There is also an informative Proteopedia entry about our molecule.
- What does it do?
- While not really a web-based biology tool, Google allows us to find more useful resources like this molecular dynamics movie
The more controlled environment provided by the Biology Workbench provides a less distracting setting for hands-on learning.
|
Web-Based Tools and Databases