bioinformatics projects for students

I just love this title! It's nerdy and cute, all at the same time. I read about this in www.researchblogging.org and had to check out the paper and blog write up from The Beagle Project (BTW: some of you may be interested in knowing that The Beagle Project is not a blog about dogs.) The paper describes a class where students from Marseilles University investigate the function of unidentified genes from a Global Ocean Sampling experiment. All the sequences are obtained from the environmental sequence division at the NCBI. Students follow the procedure outlined below: This is a great…

Do mosquitoes get the mumps? Part V. A general method for finding interesting things in GenBank This is the last in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes and a general method for finding other interesting things. In this last part, I discuss a general method for finding novel things in GenBank and how this kind of project could be a good sort of discovery, inquiry-based project for biology, microbiology, or bioinformatics students. I. The back story from the genome record II. What do the mumps proteins do? And how do we find out? III.…