Designing online web bioinformatics tutorial lessons for the suite of BLAST programs.

• Main Author: Norhana Ahmad.
• Other Authors: Yu Chin-Wen Kenneth
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Science::General::Education
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/49391
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

An online tutorial is specifically designed to introduce Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) to pre-university students and demonstrate its importance in sequence analyses through a simplified storyline on the hypocretin discovery of narcolepsy. Most online BLAST tutorials target the university students, and their BLAST guides tend to be quite descriptive and technical for the pre-university students to comprehend. To make the tutorial appealing to the young students, simple step-by-step instructions were used in the protein and nucleotide BLAST guides with screenshots accompanying each step of the process while the narcolepsy storyline was delivered in 3-panel comics. Important features of the BLAST output were tabulated and briefly described in the ‘BLAST Output’ tab of the tutorial’s website. GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) and Microsoft Office 2003 programs were used to re-draw the comics and design the tutorial sheet respectively. From this project, students learn to use the web-based BLAST programs, interpret their BLAST results and understand its importance in sequence analyses. It is believed that the overall design of the project’s tutorial will greatly enhance the students’ understanding of the subject and therefore, it would be advisable for future BLAST tutorials to follow suit once its effectiveness is proven successful.