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Molecular Basis of Xenopus Development |
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This tutorial provides an opportunity for you to become familiar with some of the research tools available on the Web. You should execute the following two links, but do not proceed further than is indicated unless you have a lot of time available When you are through exploring these links, return to this page to begin your assignment. Xenopus laevis has been exploited extensively as an organism for the study of embryonic development. The utility of Xenopus increased dramatically when techniques were developed to conduct whole mount in situ gene expression and immunolocalization studies. The Internet provides the means for you to visualize many of the known expression patterns through the auspices of The Xenopus Molecular Marker Resource, which is maintained by Dr. Peter Vize at The University of Texas. Click on Marker Index, which presents a list of markers. Each page will have an image and additional information about the marker. Select any marker at random. The images are small , but if you click on them, larger images will appear. Note that you can obtain substantial information about the markers. Now, for your assignment...Each Student is assigned to obtain information about one of the marker genes. Select one of the markers below:
For your marker, obtain the following information. 1. Original citation. Note that each marker has an original reference listed, usually with a link to the abstract in Entrez. (0.1 points) 2. Describe in your own words the expression pattern of the marker and its role in development. (0.75 points) 3. Click on the "original citation" (found in #1) of your marker to view the abstract of your citation in Entrez. If there is no link to an abstract, you should conduct your own Entrez search. From the Entrez search, click on the "Related Articles" link and find the citation of the most recent article listed there. The list of articles resulting from the "Related Articles" search is not in chronological order. Therefore, limiting the search, i.e. with a 30 day limit, will retrieve fewer related articles, which will make it easier to sort through. Briefly describe in your own words the findings in that paper. (0.75 points) 4. Download the sequence of the gene. Determine the coding sequence (CDS) and then indicate the nucleotide sequence encoding the first FOUR amino acids. (0.25 points) 5. Where would you obtain the gene to conduct research on it? Be specific. (0.15 points)
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