Dear Ciliate Researchers,

TGD is now presenting an online tutorial at
http://www.ciliate.org/generaltutorial to help familiarize everyone with
the pages and tools that can be found at our site.  In this tutorial we
walk through basic features of the Locus Page, the GBrowse genome
browser
utility, and full-text literature searches using Textpresso.  Excerpts
from the tutorial:

On the Locus Page:
"The Locus Page is the portal to all information in TGD related to a
particular gene: literature, sequences, protein annotations, its genomic
location, and more. If information has been published about a gene, the
page will be split into two halves. [...]  The upper half contains
annotation TGD curators have attributed to the gene as it has been
described in the literature. The lower half contains TGD's automatic
annotation of the preliminary TIGR gene model that we have determined
corresponds to the published gene. Since conflicts may exist between the
sequence described for the published gene and the TIGR gene model, TGD
is
not integrating these two halves of the page at this time..."

On GBrowse:
"...scroll your browser down to the "Tracks" section of the [GBrowse]
page. TGD has mapped all available Tetrahymena EST sequences to the
genome, and you can choose to view these matches in the GBrowse window
by
selecting the "Tetrahymena EST Multiple Hits to Genome (BLAT)" and
"Tetrahymena EST Unique Hits to Genome (BLAT)" tracks, then clicking
"Update Image". At the moment Tetrahymena has a modest set of ESTs, but
as
luck would have it, two ... putative chitin synthase genes, PreTt27120
and
PreTt27123, have hits in this dataset. Though these predicted gene
models
may or may not be perfect representations of the coding sequences
expressed in this area, it appears that at least parts of PreTt27120 and
PreTt27123 are transcribed..."

On Textpresso:
"A careful reading of the results returned for this article shows that
most of the instances of the word "chitin" pertain to fungi of some
sort. Perhaps it would be more informative to see if the words
"chitin" and "Tetrahymena" are mentioned in the same sentence. To
perform
this search, return to the Textpresso search box and
enter "chitin Tetrahymena". For Textpresso, a white space between words
is
treated as an "AND" expression: this will search for "chitin" and
"Tetrahymena" in the same sentence..."

We hope you'll take the time to visit the tutorial and learn more about
the features at TGD.  As always, if you have any questions about the
tools
we offer or any of the information we present, email us at
[log in to unmask]

Sincerely,
The Staff at TGD
www.ciliate.org