Welcome to the WWW links and exercises for the first two weeks of Course 30431, Introduction to Bioinformatics, autumn 1999. These pages are intended as a guide for trying out in practice some of the methods presented in the lectures. Do the exercises at your own convenience - you are not required to hand in any answers. However, to get full advantage of these pages, you should read them through and attempt to do the exercises before the next lecture, where there will be a chance to discuss them.
Note that most of the exercises use external resources that are not maintained here at CBS. The exercise pages have been designed such that clicking on a link to an external resource will open the resource in a separate window. This will (if it works) allow you to continue reading the exercise manual while working with the external resource.
Note: The three solutions described on page 3 are only a subset of the distance matrix methods. They all imply a molecular clock and therefore produce rooted trees. This is not the case of the "neighbour joining" algorithm used in the exercise above.
Technical note: This sites uses java, a WWW programming language. If you do not see a phylogenetic tree displayed in the center of the intro page, your browser is not able to handle java, and you won't get any fun out of this site. B>Technical note: There is a small bug in the java program, which means that parameter changes are ignored if you just click at the "New Tree" button. To change a parameter: click in the field you want to change, type in the new number, and press ENTER. This goes for all the subsequent pages also.