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Grade 8 Biology: Understanding the NCBI Database

March 8, 2019

In order to further reinforce the students' understanding of modern biological studies, the middle school biology group organized another bioinformatics activity through the Mac Lab platform. This activity allowed students to learn about the structure of the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnological Information) database, the most commonly used database in modern biological studies.

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In this activity, students were guided through the NCBI website and looked at the many taxonomy resources. By browsing the taxonomical statistics, students were able to find the number of taxa available on NCBI for every group of organisms. The students were amazed by the fact that the NCBI database contains information on more than 430,000 species in total. Through this, the students gained insight on the importance of the NCBI database in bioinformatics.

Students then learned how to browse the NCBI database for information on a particular organism. To raise student interest, the biology group specially designed a part in which students could look up genetic data of Libanorhinus succinus, an extinct beetle that lived more than 120 million years ago. It was the first time many students found out that DNA from long extinct organisms can still be sequenced and placed onto a database today. Through this part of the exercise, students also practiced reading GenBank information to look for various categories, such as number of base pairs and the paper in which the sequence is first published.

The middle school biology group successfully secured the importance of teaching bioinformatics as part of the Grade 8 biology curriculum. Through continuously organizing more bioinformatic-related activities via the Mac Lab platform, students of 8th grade biology can understand more and more aspects of bioinformatics, as well as learn more about using modern techniques of biological analysis.

(Written by Ivan Yuan，Yao Shenghua Pictures by Yao Shenghua)