BCOR 101

First Gene Assignment

You have all been assigned a gene (at random) which will be your personal gene for the semester. Throughout the semester and you will be given questions to answer about your gene, the answers to which will be found through your own research, on NCBI web pages and in journals in the library.

To get started, your first assignment is to determine (by next week):

Some of the names are hard to decipher! At this point we only need a very brief (1-2 sentence) description of what kind of gene it is and what kind of organism has it.

You should be able to find the chromosome location if yours is an organism that has been fully sequenced, as well as the map position in centimorgans.

The best place to find this kind of information is at the NCBI web site. It is a huge collection of genetic databases that collate all kinds of information about genes in model organisms. The web address is: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

Which takes you to this page:

In many cases you can just type your gene name into the search box on this page, but you will probably do better if you choose the gene-centered database (Entrez Gene at the bottome of the window). You will likely get much more information than you want, so you'll have to sift through the information to find the map position.

Some of you have genes that are basic building blocks of life and which are present in many different organisms. If so, choose one organism to concentrate on. You'll probably do best if you choose one of the major model organisms (human, mouse, Drosophila, Arabidopsis, C. elegans, yeast). When in doubt, choose humans.

You'll find this site to be a gateway to a huge amount of information, so have fun exploring!