Material Detail

This site contains several animations that can be viewed online or downloaded
for presentations. The animations typically allow the user to control the
reaction by requiring them to hit a button to begin each step or move to the
next step. There is also a repeat button if any review is needed. The polymerase
chain reaction is presented in easy to follow illustrations and goes through
three cycles. It is followed by a user-generated graph of copy number versus
cycle that uses data from many more cycles. The gel analysis of polymorphisms,
the application of pcr that follows, is likely to be unclear and confusing to
the novice. The Southern Blot animation is presented as a scenario that
collects data that the user is asked to interpret. Cycle sequencing is an
animation of DNA sequencing and interpretation of electrophergrams. BOth of
these animations are quite well done. DNA Detectives presents three true cases,
two on paternity and one murder/rape, for the user to solve using DNA
fingerprint data.They are rather simple to do. AcDs is nothing more than a basic
discussion of jumping genes and the animation adds very little. Three
Polymorphisms appeared only as three diagrams without any animations, so I am
not sure what its purpose was.