This program is a puzzle-solving program where the puzzle is an unknown peptide. You are presented with a completely unknown protein and asked to sequence it, using around two dozen standard (I assume) biochemical techniques, such as acid and base degradation, cleavage by various proteases, various degradation techniques, and so on. The unknown peptide is shown on the screen as a test tube of liquid, as are any products from reactions that you perform. To perform an analysis you select the test tube containing the sample you want to analyze, select the analysis from the menus, and then a simple animated display of the steps of the analysis is shown (a refrigerator is opened, a bit of the peptide is pipetted into a test tube, the test tube is heated, and so on). Then the raw data from the analysis are presented in a new window and you must interpret these results. The results are not clean - if you donÕt use enough of the peptide in some analysis then the results you get wonÕt be very clean-cut. The final step is to put together all the fragmentary sequences that you accumulate through various analyses into a guess at the real sequence.

This program has a very nice display that gives a bit of the feel of doing the analysis for real. You must keep track of different test tubes and results from a variety of analyses, and the animations give you some idea of the steps it takes to get the results (though I suspect that only students who have actually tried working with chemicals themselves will appreciate the work represented by the animations). The screen can get quite cluttered with all the different windows around, but overall I think the interface is quite good and students will quickly catch on. The online help is fairly extensive, but the analyses and how you put the results together are complicated enough that I think students should only use this program after quite a bit of introduction to protein sequencing and the different techniques. Given this introduction, though, I suspect students would have a lot more fun with this program than with the standard cookbook chem lab exercises, since you can concentrate on the puzzle of the peptide suquence instead of the vagaries of real chemical analysis.

Computer: Macintosh

Source: BioQuest

Cost: Low (single user) / High (site license)

Last update 14th of March 1996