Biocomputing
Gibson Group
EMBL
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EMBL
Practical Course on Sequence Analysis
November 24th-December 1st, 1998
by Toby Gibson, Chenna Ramu, Christine Gemünd and Jose Castresana
The course consists of an introductory lecture on sequence analysis and four practicals introducing some of the tools available at EMBL on UNIX computers, or available through the WWW interface. Schedules for the practicals are provided on Web pages accessible by clicking on the links below.
In the practicals, the students will investigate some protein families as an introduction to sequence analysis tools available at EMBL on UNIX and the WWW. These will include SRS, Blast 2, Bioccelerator, GCG, Clustal X and tree display programs. The students will be split into two groups and will be paired up for each X-terminal. Practicals will take place in the computer teaching lab, room V125.
Tuesday 24th October.
Thursday 26th October.
Monday 30th October.
Tuesday 1st December.
Practical 1 Web Tools (SRS, Blast2, Bioccelerator)
This practical introduces some web servers provided at EMBL. These can be accessed from any computer and are simple to use. Web servers are often the nicest way to do sequence analysis. But you should be aware that they can be unreliable, need constant care from their providers and are not suited to every task. Sometimes you have to run programs on local machines too. Database search tools are well-suited to web servers and we will try out the Blast and Bioccelerator servers at EMBL.
Practical 2 Using the GCG Sequence Analysis Package on UNIX
At EMBL, it is especially important to be able to use the GCG package on UNIX. It offers many aspects of sequence analysis that are not available on, or are unsuited for WWW servers. We will do exercises involving one, two or many sequences. Once you have mastered the WPI X-windows interface and SEQLAB multiple sequence editor, you will be able to run many other applications without much difficulty.
Practical 3. Exploring sequence databases with SRS
SRS, the Sequence Retrieval System, is a powerful program for indexing and retrieving data from sequence databases. SRS was developed at EMBL and, more recently, has been maintained at the EBI. Keywords are used to retrieve information from databases in SRS but links between databases allows users to get much more information than the keyword alone could retrieve.
Practical 4. Generating trees from aligned sequences
Molecular Evolution has revolutionised phylogenetic analysis (although it can never replace Paleontology because there is no implicit measure of time). For bench scientists, it can also be useful to produce trees from multiple alignments, even when evolution is only indirectly relevant. For example, it is important to distinguish orthologues from paralogues when extrapolating gene function between organisms.
You can find this page at http://www.embl-heidelberg.de/~seqanal/courses/Nov98/Top.html