AP Meeting and BLAST

Sue Neal and I were in Louisville from Friday afternoon until this evening.  The Advance Kentucky AP Meeting went well.  Several good speakers and I got to work on the new BLAST lab to compare DNA and protein sequence between organisms and a lab generating Hardy-Weinberg data using Microsoft Excel.  The best part of this conference is to talk with other AP teachers across the state and exchange ideas. 

On Friday we finally had Genetics but a few students did not have their discussion question ready... ummmm!  The fly lab continues as did our fast plant lab.  Unit test on Tuesday.

Our selected Topics class has wrapped up invertebrates and will start our vertebrate study on Monday.  Computer programming finished their first set of Visual BASIC problems and we will check these starting on Monday.

The BLAST site is below ... we will use this in an upcoming genetics lab and next spring in AP Biology

http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

from wikipedia...

In bioinformatics, Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, or BLAST, is an algorithm for comparing primary biological sequence information, such as the amino-acid sequences of different proteins or the nucleotides of DNA sequences. A BLAST search enables a researcher to compare a query sequence with a library or database of sequences, and identify library sequences that resemble the query sequence above a certain threshold. Different types of BLASTs are available according to the query sequences. For example, following the discovery of a previously unknown gene in the mouse, a scientist will typically perform a BLAST search of the human genome to see if humans carry a similar gene; BLAST will identify sequences in the human genome that resemble the mouse gene based on similarity of sequence. The BLAST program was designed by Stephen Altschul, Warren Gish, Webb Miller, Eugene Myers, and David J. Lipman at the NIH and was published in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 1990.^[1]