The American Society for Human Genetics is sponsoring the second annual DNA Day Essay contest. If you are a high school teacher here's your chance to combine an interesting assignment along with a contest.
This year's essay questions are:
- If you could be a human genetics researcher, what would you study
and why? - In what ways will knowledge of genetics and genomics make changes
to health and health care in the US possible?
The rules are here at GenEdNet.org
I also have an animated tutorial at Geospiza Education that might be of some help. The tutorial is titled Allelic Variants of Human Superoxide Dismutase.
It demonstrates how to find the following types of information:
- Stories about people who have a genetic disease.
- The inheritance pattern of a genetic disease - is it dominant, recessive. etc.
- Use the Gene database at the NCBI to find the gene sequence, mRNA sequence(s), and protein sequence(s).
- Find out where polymorphisms or mutations are located in the gene, using OMIM (the on-line Mendelian Inheritance in Man database).
- See where mutations map in the three dimensional structure of a protein.
- See how to search scientific literature and find freely accessible journal articles.
Check it out and Write away!
Categories
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Lots of bloggers in the DNA network have been busy these past few days writing about Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, his blog, his wife's company (23andme), and his mutation in the LRRK2 gene.
I was a little surprised to see that while other bloggers (here, here, here, and here) have been…
tags: PubMed, PubMed Central, medical informatics, bioinformatics, finding scientific articles
This is the third, and last part in a three part series on finding free scientific papers. You can read the first part here: Part I: A day in the life of an English physician and the second part, where…
No biology course is complete these days without learning how to do a BLAST search.
Herein, I describe an assignment and an animated tutorial that teachers can readily adopt and use, and give teachers a hint for obtaining the password-protected answer key.
Development of the tutorial and the…
Why is an eye, an eye and a nose, a nose? Why do different cells create different kinds of tissues when all the cells in a single organism start out with the same set of instructions (aka DNA)?
Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes is a learning activity that helps students discover, for themselves,…