Last week Levy Librarian Rachel Pinotti, MLIS traveled to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland to attend a course offered by the National Center for Bioinformatics (NCBI) called A Librarian’s Guide to NCBI. The course was designed to help librarians learn to use several databases administered by NCBI including Nucleotide, Gene, Protein, Structures, dbSNP, and MedGen. The course also covered use of NCBI tools such as BLAST® and Cn3D. Through lectures, demonstrations and exercises, the class learned the purpose of these important resources, how to use them, and how to assist and support users of these tools at their institution.
The week-long course wrapped up with a tour of the National Library of Medicine, including the library’s impressive Rare Books and Special Collections room which contains such gems as Dr. Marshall Nirenberg’s Nobel Prize and a first edition copy of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
Says Rachel, “I came out of the course with a clear understanding of the central dogma of molecular biology and of how to utilize sequence data databases. Search techniques needed in these databases is quite different than searching traditional literature databases such as PubMed. I am excited to develop services to support basic and translation scientists here at ISMMS improve their search capabilities and make more meaningful use of the incredible tools offered by the National Center for Bioinformatics. The quality and quantity of sequence and variation data accessible through these tools is really quite amazing.”
Rachel can help with improving your BLAST® search and can help you navigate through a GenBank flat file or Gene record. She can be reached at Rachel.Pinotti@mssm.edu.
