Most bioinformatics work starts with data that someone else has already produced. Public biological databases hold millions of sequences, genes, and proteins, and knowing where to look and how to read what you find is a core skill. This module shows you how.
You'll start with NCBI and GenBank, the main nucleotide sequence resources, and learn how records, accession numbers, and searches work. Then you'll move to UniProt, the standard database for protein sequences and their functions, and practise searching for a protein and reading its entry.
Finally, you'll meet the file formats this data comes in: FASTA for sequences, FASTQ for sequencing reads with quality scores, and GFF and VCF for gene annotations and variants. You'll meet these formats again in almost every later module. Once you've finished, move on to Python & R for Bioinformatics.
How to search NCBI's GenBank, filter results, read a sequence record and its accession number, and download a sequence in FASTA format.
An introduction to the Universal Protein Resource, the main database of protein sequences and functional information.
How to search UniProt, switch between result views, and narrow down results to find the protein you want.