Web Exploration: Favism

Background: Labs in Bioinformatics

Labs in this class will take three basic forms:

• Biological wet labs, in which you will do some basic biology in order to procure data for analysis.
• Computer programming dry labs in which you will write and modify short programs.
• Web explorations, in which you will explore tools and data available on the Web.

This laboratory is a Web exploration.

Preparation

1. Create a team of three people which includes at least one person who has taken some biology and at least one person who has taken some computer science.

2. Your goal is to find out some things about favism using some extant bioinformatics data resources, primarily at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.

Questions

Go to the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) website and use the OMIM (online Mendelian inheritance in man) search to look for favism.

1. What is favism?

2. What cell types are affected?

3. What is the function of the gene?

4. Which chromosome carries the gene? What is its location? What does this tell you about its inheritance?

5. Why is the allele prevalent?

6. How large is the gene? What is the sequence?

7. How large is the protein? What is the sequence?

8. Is there a crystal structure for the protein? Does the protein act alone or in a complex?

9. Why do we care about favism?

10. How many articles have been published in the last year?

Hint: We suggest you start with OMIM, but also use the protein, nucleotide, and structure search engines on the NCBI site.