Authors of original unit: John Sabo, Jamie Lynch, & Deanna Raineri

Partner Projects: Biology Student Workbench

Grade Level: High school chemistry teachers

Subject Areas: Three Domains of life, Eubacteria, Eukarya, Archaea

In this tutorial, you will use the sequences of these informational genes (rpoK and TFIID) to determine how closely related the three Domains of life are to one another at the molecular level. You will use a program designed for researchers, namely, the Biology Workbench, to search for and compare sequences. In order to become familiar with this comprehensive program, we have outlined the basic tools of the Workbench in the following tutorial. You will now become the researcher and begin to untangle the web of life.

Intended for high school chemistry teachers, who wish to use computational tools in the classroom. Also suitable for introductory college chemistry. It could also be used directly by students for self-study.

Web browser (preferably Firefox) that is Javascript-enabled. To find out which plugins are already installed on your mozilla/firefox browser, just type 'about:plugins' in address box. You can download each plug-in component from the links provided and you can test if your system support Javascript from here.

Introduction: Background information on The Three Domains of Life

Part 1: Opening An Account, Starting a new Session and Importing Sequences from Protein Databases

Part 2: Using the Ndjinn Tool: to Search Sequence Databases

Part 3: Using the BLAST Tool to Find Homologous (Similar) Sequences

Part 4: Creating a Phylogenetic Tree