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TASK 8 – BLAST IT! PREVENT A VIRUS PANDEMIC
AUTHORS
Jacinta Duncan – The Gene Technology Access Centre
DESCRIPTION OF TASK
In this activity students assume the role of a medical GP to diagnose and treat a patient. They use pathology and sequencing results to run a diagnostic BLAST to discover what virus is infecting their patient. They explore the mortality of the disease and the possibility of it causing a pandemic using the WHO website.
Link to VCE Biology
Unit 3: Outcome 1
• Applications of molecular biology in medicine – medical diagnosis
Unit 3: Outcome 2
• Detecting ‘self’ and ‘non-self’ molecules: antigens and membrane receptors; pathogens – non-cellular agents
BACKGROUND
The Instructional Power Point presentation should be used by teachers to introduce this task. The task is designed to be completed within one class with some questions being completed at home and an optional follow-up discussion on avoiding pandemics. For year 10 students, this activity could be set as an in-class assignment. Time spent on the activity would vary according to ability.
MATERIALS
PowerPoint Presentation “BLAST It!” (Students should save this to their desktop prior to beginning this task)
Student Instructions for Biology WorkBench (recommended teachers copy this for student use in class).
Student Worksheet - Teachers copy this for students
Neuraminidase sequence (students need to save this to their computer so they can copy and paste it to conduct their diagnostic BLAST search)
NCBI BLAST search conducted in explorer at the URL http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
WHO website http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian_influenza/en/
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