Online Learning Readiness Tool Guide

A user guide for the Online Learning Readiness Tool, developed as part of the Jisc Scaling up online learning project.

E-safety: quick self-assessment tool 2012

The old Ofsted school inspection framework introduced in September 2009 has been re-designed to be applied to the adult sector. An action plan and completion dates have been added. Whilst Ofsted are no longer restricting overall grade if an organisation receives a grade of 4, in e-safety they still want to see that learners feel safe.

Online exercise for the design and simulation of PCR and PCR-RFLP experiments

[EN] Background: Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism of PCR products (PCR-RFLP) are extensively used molecular biology techniques. An exercise for the design and simulation of PCR and PCR-RFLP experiments will be a useful educational tool. Findings: An online PCR and PCR-RFLP exercise has been create that requires users to find the target genes,compare them, design primers, search for restriction endonucleases, and finally to simulate the experiment. Each user of the service is randomly assigned a gene from Escherichia coli; to complete the exercise, users must design an experiment capable of distinguishing among E. coli strains. By applying the experimental procedure to all completely sequenced E. coli, a basic understanding of strain comparison and clustering can also be acquired. Comparison of results obtained in different experiments is also very instructive. Conclusions: The exercise is freely available at http://insilico.ehu.es/edu.

A combined statistical model for multiple motifs search

Transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) play key roles in genebior 6.8 wavelet expression and regulation. They are short sequence segments with de¯nite structure and can be recognized by the corresponding transcription factors correctly. From the viewpoint of statistics, the candidates of TFBS should be quite di®erent from the segments that are randomly combined together by nucleotide. This paper proposes a combined statistical model for ¯nding over- represented short sequence segments in di®erent kinds of data set. While the over-represented short sequence segment is described by position weight matrix, the nucleotide distribution at most sites of the segment should be far from the background nucleotide distribution. The central idea of this approach is to search for such kind of signals. This algorithm is tested on 3 data sets, including binding sites data set of cyclic AMP receptor protein in E.coli, PlantProm DB which is a non-redundant collection of proximal promoter sequences from di®erent species, collection of the intergenic sequences of the whole genome of E.Coli. Even though the complexity of these three data sets is quite di®erent, the results show that this model is rather general and sensible.

Protein and amino acid requirements of warm-water fishes: a tool to efficient and low-cost fish feed production in Nigeria

Numerous investigations have utilized various semi-purified and purified diets to estimate the protein and amino acid requirements of several temperate fishes. The vast literature on the protein and amino acid requirements of fishes has continued to omit that of the tropical warm water species. The net effect is that fish feed formulation in Nigeria have relied on the requirement for temperate species. This paper attempts to review the state of knowledge on the protein amino acid requirements of fishes with emphasis on the warm water species, the methods of protein and amino acid requirement determinations and the influence of various factors on nutritional requirement studies. Finally evidence are presented with specific examples on how requirements of warm water fishes are different from the temperate species and used this to justify why fish feed formulation in Nigeria are far from being efficient