In this assignment, those of you that do not know how to access a gene database will be introduced to this.

Clik on the link: NCBI

a window will open

Top left; in the menu "Search" scroll the menu and choose "Gene" (this is the individual gene database): in the window below the right, tape the name of the gene you are looking for (example: "hemoglobin, beta chain, homo sapiens"), then click "Search". This will make you entering a list of all the records containing files of your gene of interest. Now you can scroll the list and choose (for example, if you made hemoglobin beta chain, choose now HBB)

Scroll the page to look at all the information available. In the first section there are general information and a brief description. In the second section, there are representation of the chromosome (blue bar continuous), transcript (green bar), mRNA (Blue bar, discontinuous) and coding sequence (red bars, discontinuous). There are several codes around the image, that are the identifiers of the individual sequence files. Just above the map figure, there is a "Go to nucleotide" pointing to three links (these are different sequence formats): click on the "GenBank" choiche and you are now redirected to the genome sequence file "NC_000011.9" of the beta-globin locus in humans.

In this file there are several lines of information, then if you scroll down, you reach proper sequence infomation ("FEATURES"),

<Source> and <gene> give lenghts and position. <mRNA> indicates how the mRNA is composed (exons joining), and <CDS> gives you positions and jining of the ORF (open reading frame).

Look at the sequence now: it is organized in lines of 60 nt, in 10-nt blocks; numbers represent positions to your convenience.

You may now identify the essential parts of the gene. Try to identify the transcription start site and the start and stop of the ORF.

Go to Assignment BMG2 now.