In this section you will learn how to get started with the Biology Workbench; namely, opening an account, logging into your account, and creating a session (i.e. folder) to store your data.

Opening An Account
Click to see a video demo of this step.  In order to play these videos, you should have flashplayer plugin installed. You can download the plugin from .

Go to the Biology Workbench homepage in Workbench panel. Click on the link that says, "Registration". If you already have an account, go ahead and log into the program. If not, you need to open an account first.  It is free and it is available immediately. Once your account is created, you will be taken to another website Click on the link that reads Biology Workbench to go to the main page.

Starting a New Session
Click to see a video demo of this step.  In order to play these videos, you should have flashplayer plugin installed. You can download the plugin from .

There are a few different sets of tools supplied by the Workbench. They are Session Tools, Protein Tools, Nucleic Tools, Alignment Tools and Structure Tools (Alpha). To maintain some organization in your research, you should create a new session for every new topic you research.
1. From the window highlight the line that reads Start New Session and click Run, You will be taken to another window
2. Type the name of the new session, for example,Hypercholesterolemia, in the space provided and then click the Start New Session button You will be taken to another window.

Once set up with your own account and new session you can really begin. In this section you will learn how to search databases for protein sequences. Finding the wild type prion protein sequence is a great way to get started.

In this tutorial, you are going to learn how to use the tools that will allow you to search protein databases and analyze protein sequences imported into the Workbench. Clicking on the box that says "Protein Tools" at the top of the page will bring you to the Protein Tools homepage.



The new page says it is "empty", that is, no protein sequences have been saved here yet. Importing sequences from any number of sequence databases will change this and the word "empty" will disappear; in its place will be the list of sequences that were imported.