RCMI Program Hosts NCBI Workshops

The RCMI AIDS and Emerging Diseases Program and the RCMI Center for Information Architecture in Research co-hosted two workshops offered by staff from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine.

A Field Guide to GenBank and NCBI Molecular Biology Resources was held on May 14 and 15, 2002. This workshop covered topics such as GenBank database: description and scope; the NCBI Structures Database; the Molecular Modeling Database (MMDB); similarity searching using NCBI BLAST, and genomic resources at NCBI. After a morning lecture on May 14, participants attended one of three hands-on sessions at CompuCentro to have practical exercises on the use of these resources.

Have a BLAST! A Practical Course on the Basic Local Alignment Searching Tool (BLAST) was held on May 16, 2002 at CompuCentro. This workshop included topics such as sequence alignments; basic web BLAST; advanced options; Megablast; PSI- and RPS- BLAST; genomic BLAST pages, and Standalone BLAST and BLAST Client.

From left to right: Dr. Wayne Matten, Dr. Peter Cooper, Dr. Adelfa Serrano, Dr. Walter Silva, (Associate Dean of Biomedical Sciences School of Medicine) and Dr. Emma Fernández-Repollet (RCMI Program Director).

Drs. Peter Cooper and Wayne Matten were the NCBI instructors for both workshops. Participants included faculty and graduate students from the Medical Sciences Campus, the Río Piedras Campus, the Cayey Campus and San Juan Bautista School of Medicine. Local coordination was provided by Dr. Adelfa Serrano, Coordinator, RCMI AIDS and Emerging Diseases Program; Dr. José G. Conde, Coordinator, RCMI Center for Information Architecture, and Dr. Michael Rubin, Professor of Biology, University of Puerto Rico at Cayey.

From left to right: Dr. Adelfa Serrano, Dr. Wayne Matten, Dr. Michael Rubin and Dr. Peter Cooper.

Internet access to NCBI resources was facilitated through the Medical Sciences Campus connection to the Internet2, perated locally by the University of Puerto Rico High Performance Computing facility . Participants had excellent comments about both the content of the workshops and the expertise of the instructors.

Thank you Dr. Cooper, Dr. Matten and NCBI for two excellent training activities.

José G. Conde
RCMI Program

Emma Fernández-Repollet,Ph.D.

Program Director

RCMI Program

Room 621-A, 6th. floor

Main Building, Medical Sciences Campus

GPO Box 365067

San Juan, PR 00936-5067

Email: e.fernandez@upr.edu

Voice (787) 763-9401

FAX (787) 758-5206