In practice

In this section of Bioinformatics@school you can feel what it is like to be a bioinformatician. Use real-life bioinformatics tools to tackle the research questions in three different practical assignments. They all take 45 to 60 minutes to do.

• Murder at the airport: Become a Crime Scene Investigator and investigate the cause of death of an American tourist at the airport. Find out which protein is responsible for his death by searching protein sequence databases on the Internet.
  
  
• 3D drug design: Investigate protein to learn about its structural properties and stop its devastating effects. Enter the world of protein structures with Yasara, a program with which you can view, manipulate, rotate and zoom your molecules. Note: this is a nice follow-up to Murder at the airport, but you can also do it standalone.
  
  
• Retinitis pigmentosa: Find out the cause of a nasty eye-disease. You start with the patient's DNA and work your way up to a 3D protein structure.