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Session Tools

The tools in the Biology Workbench are divided into five categories, displayed prominently as a row of buttons:

Helper Applications
Select this link in the Biology Workbench to learn more about helper applications and plug-ins that can be used with the Biology Workbench.

Click on a category of tools below to learn more about them, or click Next above to go through each of these categories.

 Session Tools
This is the place to start using the Biology Workbench. Session Tools allow you to save your work for future reference. Each time you use Version 3.2 of the Biology Workbench, you must either begin a new session or resume a previously created session.

Protein Tools
Protein Tools contain applications for predicting the secondary structure of a protein, given its amino acid sequence, applications for analyzing the amino acid composition of a protein, and general sequence analysis applications.

Nucleic Tools
Nucleic Tools combine general sequence analysis applications, with applications that are specifically for analyzing DNA or RNA.

Alignment Tools
Alignment Tools allow you to view and analyze aligned sequences.

Structure Tools (Alpha)
Structural Tools allow you to view, analyze, and manipulate sequence structures.

To hopefully clear up any questions thus far, here is a simple illustration. The tools, while displayed nicely side-by-side, are really divided up into three categories or levels. Someone who has never used the Workbench before would start with Session tools, move to either Protein or Nucleic tools (depending on the biological problem to be solved) to find or upload sequences, and then move to Alignment tools.

  1. Session tools
  2. Protein tools or Nucleic tools
  3. Alignment tools
Those who have used the Workbench to create a session may already have the desired sequences uploaded, and, after activating the appropriate session, might wish to go directly to Alignment tools to do their work.
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This lesson is now maintained by Johnny Tenegra.
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