Instruction & Tours

The Bioscience Library holds training sessions in our Seminar Room, just inside the library entrance. These are hands-on sessions with no need to register in advance.

We are interested in your ideas about improving existing sessions, or creating a new session tailored specifically for your research group. Contact us to submit comments or to request a special session.

Introduction to NCBI tools: BLAST

• Date:  Friday, December 4
• Time:  10:00 am - 11:00 am
• Location:   Marian Koshland Bioscience Library Seminar Room, 2103 VLSB (near the triceratops)

This session will provide a general overview of the molecular biology resources from NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information). Specifically, it will highlight BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool).

BLAST is a set of programs designed to perform similarity searches on all available sequence data. The program compares nucleotide or protein sequences to sequence databases and calculates the statistical significance of matches. BLAST can be used to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences as well as help identify genes and genetic features.

BIOBASE: Proteome Databases Training

• Date:  Thursday, December 10
• Time:  1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
• Location:   Marian Koshland Bioscience Library Seminar Room, 2103 VLSB (near the triceratops)

The Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resource Library has licensed the BIOBASE Knowledge Library. It is an up-to-date collection of information for characterized and uncharacterized proteins of human, mouse, rat, yeasts, pathogenic fungi and worm. We provide access to the following databases:

• YPD™ (Saccharomyces cerevisiae)
• PombePD™ (Schizosaccaharomyces pombe)
• WormPD™ (Caenorhabditis elegans)
• MycoPathPD™ MycoPathPD is the human fungal pathogen database containing 18 fungal pathogens
• HumanPSD™ BIOBASE Survey Database for information on human, mouse, and rat proteins
• GPCR-PD™ G Protein-coupled Receptors database for human, mouse and rat proteins, their ligands and downstream signaling molecules

More information can be found on http://biobase-international.com

The training room accommodates up to 25 people. Our seminar room is equipped with 12 iMacs. You are welcome to bring in your own laptop.

EndNote Workshop

• Date: Friday, December 11
• Time: 10:00 am - 11:30 am
• Location: Marian Koshland Bioscience Library Seminar Room, 2103 VLSB (near the triceratops)

EndNote is a widely-used, powerful reference management tool. This hands-on workshop will include an overview of EndNote features. You will learn to:

• Import references from an array of databases
• Organize references
• Insert citations into a manuscript
• Format bibliographies in hundreds of styles

Our seminar room is equipped with 12 iMacs. If you already have EndNote installed on your laptop, you can work on your own computer. No sign-up is needed.

Special Instruction
The Bioscience and Natural Resources Library also offers special tours/seminars for the College of Natural Resources and for the Biological Sciences. For more information, or for scheduling, contact Norma Kobzina, 643-6475 or Beth Weil, 642-9706.