What are guided tours?*

Believe me, doing is a lot more fun than reading about it, and text books seldom allow you even that pleasure. What is "it"? -- the hot pursuit of answers to interesting questions, a chase that may take you through web sites, databases, research articles... whereever it goes. However, you are probably not equipped at present to keep pace. So, these first times out, I'll ride along with you suggesting where to go and what clues to look for. Periodically, I'll post to the web site a set of instructions, questions, wry observations, etc, aimed at getting you in the hunt.

Why are guided tours?

The sites and research articles visited by the tours were not made with you in mind but rather for those who spend their lives in research... which COULD be you too! It is therefore unrealistic to just throw you to those resources and hope for the best. Actually that isn't a bad idea, but the frustration level may be higher than acceptable. So, guided tours. They let you experience the process of discovery in a similar way as the person who first found the path. In this way you learn what bioinformatics is able to do as well as its limitations.

Why doesn't Tour X work?

The greater the distance in time from the posting of a tour and your reading it, the greater the chance that some key link will be broken. That's the nature of the web. Please don't be surprised, but please do contact me telling me of the problem. The tour may also fail because it fails to take into account your particular brand of inexperience. This was not my intent but means only that I did not know you at the time I wrote the tour. Please bring the oversight to my attention.

Bear in mind that in attacking real scientific questions using real scientific resources, you are doing something quite difficult but still well within your means. You will need patience and the strength to accept momentary confusion. But you will also need the resourcefulness to identify the source of your confusion, to confront it, and to thwart it.

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*Inspired by the excellent text, Discovering Genomics, Proteomics, and Bioinformatics by Malcolm Campbell and Laurie Heyer.