Biology

Bioinformatics seeks to employ information technology and computer science to explore biological processes. The assembly of the human genome is just one of the great acheivements resulting from the collection and analysis of bioinformatic data.

UCSC Genome BioInformatics - contains tools for exploring the reference sequence and working draft assemblies for a large collection of genomes.

Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) - finds regions of local similarity between sequences. It can be used to infer functional and evolutionary relationships between sequences as well as help identify members of gene families.

Entrez - is a tool for searching across multiple life sciences databases. For example, Entrez Gene is a gateway to gene-related sequence, variation, expression and structural data.

Tutorials for using these resources are found in MIT's BioInformatics Tutorial Series (BITS).