For cutting-edge research, click here
WEB WATCH
If you fancy being a virtual intern to a doctor as he makes his rounds examining patients, there’s a bio-interactive website that’s just for you, says N S Soundar Rajan
BioInteractive is a web-based collection of biological teaching material, created and hosted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a non-profit medical research organisation based in the US. HHMI Bio-Interactive, at http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/index.html, offers teaching resources categorised under:
Neuroscience
Infectious diseases
Stem cells
Evolution
Obesity
Cancer
Genomics and chemical genetics
Sex determination
Biological clocks
Cardiovascular
Immunology
DNA and RNA
Click and learn
Some interesting pages are:
The Transgenic Fly Virtual Lab: It is a collection of science and techniques used to make transgenic flies. You can explore basic principles of circadian biology and genetics and even create a transgenic fly to study circadian rhythms. A link has been provided to for teachers to learn more.
The Bacterial Identification Lab: It covers the science that is used to identify different types of bacteria based on their DNA sequence. The techniques used in this lab are applicable in a wide variety of settings including scientific research and forensic labs.
The Cardiology Lab: It focuses on diseases of the heart. At this lab, you can accompany a doctor — as a virtual intern — and examine three different patients. Each patient is examined using more than one diagnostic tool and the doctor will invite you to examine the patient yourself and ask for your opinion. Through a ‘Basic Cardiology Guide’ and ‘Diagnostic Tools Guide’, you can brush up on facts about the heart and heart diseases, medical term
inology and other available diagnostic tools.
The Neurophysiology Lab: Here you can record electrical activities of individual neurons while you deliver mechanical stimulus to the skin, inject fluorescent dyes into the neurons to view its morphology and identify neurons based on the morphology and the response to stimuli, comparing them to previously published results.
The Immunology Lab gives you a better understanding of experimental design, key concepts in immunological reactions and interpretation of data.
For budding scientists
The ‘Click and Learn’ section at Bio-Interactive offers short lessons, illustrated through an interactive web animation design.
The lessons include controlling animal locomotion, electrical activity of neurons, immunology primer, retroviruses and viral diversity, stem cell therapies, visualising gene expression, origins of modern humans, antibiotic attacks and electrocardiogram primer.
The ‘Holiday Lectures on Science’ is another attraction on the site. Each one of these four one-hour lectures offers students and teachers the opportunity to learn about cutting-edge biomedical research with the intention to inspire young students to pursue a career in science. ‘Holiday Lectures’ are webcast live at http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/hl/. Webcasts of old Holiday Lectures are available, on-demand, at http://www.hhmi. org/biointeractive/lectures/index.html.
If you have a question about medicine, human biology or genetics, you can have them answered through BioInteractive’s ‘Ask a Scientist’ option.
In addition to the available material, BioInteractive offers DVDs of HHMI’s annual Holiday Lectures on Science and CD-ROMs of the ‘Virtual Lab’ series. These materials are available to educators for free and can be ordered from the catalogue at http://catalog. hhmi.org.
