NCBI (The National Center for Biotechnology Information) is an online database of a vast number of DNA and protein sequences that have been characterized over the course of several years. It's run through PubMed and probably through grants from the National Library of Medicine.
The Europeans have their version of NCBI, called EMBL-EBI (European Molecular Biology Laboratory - European Bioinformatics Institute). The EMBL-EBI website offers a program called ClustalW which allows you to take DNA or protein sequences and aligning them to each other.
This website offers an embedded cut and paste sort of format that enables you to compare sequences. It also offers individual programs, ClustalW and ClustalX to compare sequences.
Now why the hell am I babbling about this?
I used the ClustalX program to illustrate to students the genetic similarities and differences that exist between the human flu and the emergent H1N1 flu. The ClustalW program seems more technical, I liked the window input rather than the DOS-like input format.
Students thought the comparison of DNA was kind of cool. Using the program itself can be tricky. You have to save sequences as notepad files where the sequence you save off of the NCBI or EMBL-EBI sites are in FASTA form.
Once you download and install the program, you can use the help menu to help you figure that out.
A link has been added to my living environment list to the right.
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