For many years, many of you have been using our popular BLAST for beginners tutorial and the BLASTing through the kingdom of life activity. We decided with the recent updates to the NCBI BLAST pages that it was a good time to update the tutorial and some of the sequences as well. In the tutorial, we've added images that represent the current web pages at the NCBI. For our data set of sequences, we made a couple of the sequences longer, to remove the ambiguity in determining which sequence matches the query best.
Of course, this meant that we also needed to update the answer key. Done! You can get an Excel spread sheet with updated answers by signing up for an educator account and logging in.
We also realized that many of you might be curious about how we got these answers from our BLAST results. To address that issue, we wrote a teacher guide, the BLASTing Through the Kingdom of Life: A Teachers Guide.
This was the first eBook we've made that really takes full advantage of the bells and whistles available in iBooks Author. If you get the book from iTunes, you can scroll through long sequences, expand pages to fill the screen, view glossary terms, watch animations and a short video, and more. It's lots of fun! And, you can read it on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad.
We also made a PDF version with the same information. It's just missing some of the fancier features.
We hope you enjoy these! If you do, please write a review!
BLASTing Through the Kingdom of Life: A Teachers Guide is available as a PDF in our TPT store and as an interactive book on the iTunes Book store. Download a copy today!
