Week+of+9-14-09

=Back to GN's Logbook= =**9/14/09**= Had computer difficulties at home; and I would also like to convey my continuing annoyance that the wikispaces site is blocked at St. Joe, rendering the study hall given to me for this class pointless. Efforts to have it unblocked have proven fruitless. =**9/15/09**= Continued research for starting bioinformatics project. Having already looked over virtually the entire bioinformatics page and all associated links (except several of the weekly logbook pages) but not having detailed my learning from them, I went back and looked again so that I could better record my research. I have decided that stating what I learned from each page would be the best format for now:

**Main Page:**
A largely introductory page, this had little detail. However, the part that interested me in the project in the first place was the goals section, which illustrated a very concrete, relevant, and interesting purpose to the project. Namely, to verify work done by ND professors and to show the therapeutic uses for the work with NPC proteins.

**Procedures Page**
I followed the link to the procedures page next. For the most part, this is "techno-babble" at the moment, but I was able to discern several key components to the procedure. First, one must learn the basics of the material and obtain an adequate background in the subject. Next, one must use an online database to get a sequence to work with, and format it correctly so that it can be analyzed. This takes several steps, and it results in having several sequences juxtaposed in graphical form and a "gene-tree."

**El's milestone page**
Finding all of this very confusing, I chose to go the the previous student's milestone page for a broader, less specific overview. I found what I was looking for. The page illustrates specifics of the learning curve, focusing on the cell as a whole, then to the more specific components of the project - what an NPC protein is, and what the amino acids are. The next questions addressed deal with the analysis methods, being the homology method, and how it relates to NPC's. One then deals with learning the hypothesis proposed by prof s XH and HG. The next step is to go through the process of analyzing a specific sequence, and comparing the results. A conclusion is then drawn from the data.

After this more general overview, I feel much more confident in starting the project, and that I have a good background given my computer science and biology experience.