Search

R ESEARCHERS all over the world are now using the World Wide Web not only as an efficient source of information but also as a repository for their own data. This creates an enormous database of the most up-to-date information, which can be easily accessed by classes with an Internet connection. As more and more schools are equipped with computers and gain access to the Web, many educators have been left wondering exactly how they can incorporate this new resource into their curricula. Biology teachers can put the Web to particularly good use in their classrooms. Accessing such web sites as the database maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is a useful introduction to the computer data search, a technique useful in many areas of science and research. At the NCBI site, students can access amino acid sequences and download them for study. These sequences can be compared to each other, and the differences in the sequences can be used to trace the evolutionary relationships between organisms. We show in this article that the information gathered from a computer database can be used as a springboard to scientific discovery.