A new series of bioinformatics workshops is being offered from Berlin, Germany. Nicola Gaedeke, the course instructor, and Susan Roberts, technical assistant, are using Web-based tools to provide distant services to the life sciences community. An initial series of NCBI classes was hosted in December 2005 with a large number of participants and successful use of Breeze Meeting, a tool for delivering dynamic virtual presentations and training courses. This series of NCBI class is now being offered Spring Semester. Attendees can participate online from their office or from a computer lab in the Health Sciences Education Building (HSEB) by logging into the virtual classroom. In order to participate, attendees need an Internet connection, a Web browser, a headset and speakers. Participants can communicate with the instructor using the chat feature, the "My Status" function, or voice if a microphone is available.

Classes focus on the databases and sequence analysis tools available from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and are held for 1.5 hours.

• NCBI1. Gene-centered Information
• NCBI2. Organism-centered Information software
• NCBI3. From Sequences-Searching to a Multiple Alignment
• NCBI4. BLAST - The Algorithm
• NCBI5. BLink - The BLAST Link
• NCBI6. MapViewer - A Genome Browser to search and view chromosomes.

A detailed description of the classes with dates and times can be found at the Library Classes page. Additional topics will be covered in the near future. There are plans to offer the classes to the resource libraries in the region. Other services provided by Nicola Gaedeke are consultations and the link-lists (see below).

For more information, suggestions and questions please contact:
Nicola Gaedeke, Ph.D.
Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library
e-mail: ngaedeke@lib.med.utah.edu