We learnt how to use the NCBI site last week. NCBI actually stands for National Center for Biotechnology Information and it is a site that houses a series of databases relevant to biotechnology and biomedicine and is an important resource for bioinformatics tools and services. Major databases include GenBank for DNA sequences and PubMed a bibliographic database for the biomedical literature.

The reason to us learning how to use the NCBI site is because our second assignment, after this blog assignment is to do a research on a given gene assigned to our groups by Dr. Azran using the NCBI site and even search for journals from that site.

Firstly we learnt how to search data (article and gene) using the search tool. The options are Nucleotide, Blast, Gene, PubMed and DNA and RNA. The nucleotide database is a collection of sequences. Blast consists of protein Blast- Blastx- Tblastin- Recent results- Tblastx. For gene, a portal to gene-specific content based on NCBI's RefSeq project. PubMed comprises more than twenty million citations for biomedical. For DNA&RNA: GeneBank- Nucleotide-Assembly-BioSample.

We learnt that we can search for article using PubMed using different keywords. For example if we use the keyword Yamanaka (full name: Shinhya Yamanaka, a Japanese Nobel Prize-winnin stem cell researcher) to search for data we will get a different data, maybe more results compared to when we search using the keyword Yamanaka S. We can also specifically search using keyword Yamanaka s AND Cell to specifically search for articles on Shinhya Yamanaka's cell articles.

Thank you.