NCBI

One of the most fundamental parts of bioinformatics is knowing how to search for and access biological data in the NCBI databases. My first encounter with these databases was in 2006 during a biology course in secondary school. Since then some basic usage of the site has been included in a couple of different courses during my bachelor's and master's education. Because it has been a while since I last used the NCBI databases I wanted to refresh my knowledge and also learn some new things. To do this I started to look for some tutorials.

The fist tutorial I found was linked from bioinformatics.org. This tutorial was last revised in 2002, so many of the directions were a bit off and some functions have been removed or replaced, but overall the tasks that are given make for a good introduction to the site. Having worked a bit with the databases before, I worked through this tutorial pretty quickly, but it was a nice way to refresh my knowledge.

When I was finished with the first tutorial I felt like doing something a bit more advanced. I found these exercises from an advanced workshop for bioinformatics information specialists. The exercises are based on frequently asked questions to the NCBI and include strategies and step-by-step instructions on how to solve the given problems. I found many of the tasks fairly basic and easy to carry out, but I liked that often more than one method to solve the exercise was described and that there were a lot of tips and tricks. Although I felt like I already knew many of the things included in the exercises, there were some new functions and some databases that I hadn't tried before, such as the dbSNP. Overall this site is a good resource to come back to for answers in the future. 

Apart from the two tutorials mentioned above, I have also looked at some of the video tutorials available at the NCBI website. There is also a ton of online tutorials and exercises from different universities around the world, but for now I think I'll have a look at brushing up on my Python programming skills.