Many teachers and trainers of bioinformatics and computational biology face a recurrent problem of keeping their software tools and databases up to date. In addition, they have to set up entire clusters of PCs installed with up-to-date software applications which they intend to teach. This is very troublesome and as a consequence takes up a lot of time and effort, and distracts from the teaching/learning process.

Our solution is to package a whole list of commonly used software into a single LiveCD/DVD that includes an entire operating system (Slax). This system called BioSlax has been in use for several years at the National University of Singapore. A server version and a VMWare version are also available.

With the BioSlax Server version, one can set up an entire server with a terabyte harddisk to act as a classroom bioinformatics server within minutes which can work in conjunction with the BioSlax LiveCDs.

This tutorial will cover the basics of getting up to speed with using BioSlax and the BioSlax Server.

The BioSlax Tutorial
Tentative Schedule

   a. What is BioSlax http://www.bioslax.com
   b. Getting Started with BioSlax User
      1. Visualising molecules with Rasmol
      2. Using Pymol
      3. BLAST
      4. Creating your private blast database
      5. Setting up a MySQL database
      6. Setting up a BioWeb server
      7. Learning Perl and CGI
      8. HMM for bioinformatics
      9. Sequence analysis with EMBOSS and Jemboss and Wemboss
      10. Sequence analysis with SMS3
      11. Multiple sequence alignment with CLUSTAL, CLUSTALX and T-Coffee
      12. More advanced Unix shell scripting
   c. BioSlax Server for your bioinformatics classroom
      1. Setting up the biomirror hard disk 1 min
      2. Plugging in the bioslax server 1min
      3. Running the bioslax server 1min
      4. Accessing a biowiki site on the server for group learning and sharing

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