education on the internet, free of charge, a real possibility. At this pivotal moment it is appropriate to explore the potential for obtaining comprehensive bioinformatics training with currently existing free video resources. This article pre-sents such a bioinformatics curric-ulum in the form of a virtual

on the internet, free of charge, a real possibility. At this pivotal moment it is appropriate to explore the potential for obtaining comprehensive bioinformatics training with currently existing free video resources. This article presents such a bioinformatics curriculum in the form of a virtual course catalog

5 (MEGA5), which is a user-friendly software for mining online databases, building sequence alignments and phylogenetic trees, and using methods of evolutionary bioinformatics in basic biology, biomedicine, and evolution. The newest addition in MEGA5 is a collection of maximum likelihood (ML

The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) provides a central resource on protein sequences and functional annotation with three database components, each addressing a key need in protein bioinformatics. The UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB), compris-ing the manually annotated Uni

programs are free and accessible online, and interdisciplinary partnerships between existing faculty members and their sup-port staff have proved advantageous in such efforts. We present examples of strategies and methods that have been successfully used to incorporate bioinformatics content into under

interface to a comprehensive online

of options to improve downstream analysis. Availability and Implementation: This open-source application was implemented in Perl and can be used as standalone version or accessed online through a user-friendly web interface. The source code, user help and additional information is available at

Summary: The Biopython project is a mature open source international collaboration of volunteer developers, providing Python libraries for a wide range of bioinformatics problems. Biopython includes modules for reading and writing different sequence file formats and multiple sequence alignments

*S Supporting Information ABSTRACT: Mutation of the ubiquitous cytosolic enzyme Cu/ Zn superoxide dismutase (SOD1) is hypothesized to cause familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (FALS) through structural destabilization leading to misfolding and aggregation. Considering the late onset of symptoms as well as the phenotypic variability among patients with identical SOD1 mutations, it is clear that nongenetic factor(s) impact ALS etiology and disease progression. Here we examine the effect of Cys-111 glutathionylation, a physiologically prevalent post-translational oxidative modification, on the stabilities of wild type SOD1 and two phenotypically diverse FALS mutants, A4V and I112T. Glutathionylation results in profound destabilization of SOD1 WT dimers, increasing the equilibrium dissociation constant Kd to ∼10−20 μM, comparable to that of the aggressive A4V mutant. SOD1 A4V is further destabilized by glutathionylation, experiencing an ∼30-fold increase in Kd. Dissociation kinetics of glutathionylated SOD1 WT and SOD1 A4V are unchanged, as measured by surface plasmon resonance, indicating that glutathionylation destabilizes these variants by

DIALIGN is a widely used software tool for multiple DNA and protein sequence alignment. The program combines local and global alignment features and can therefore be applied to sequence data that cannot be correctly aligned by more traditional approaches. DIALIGN is available online through