Purpose
Most of you are used to finding things out by reading about them. You go to a web site or a text book and see what they have to say. Then you believe or don't believe what you've read, depending on a lot of things -- maybe the reputation of the author, how well the information comports with things you already believe, and so forth.

The purpose of this investigation is to help break you of that habit and substitute for it the practice of finding things out for yourself. In going through What is a Gene, you will ask simple questions about genes and get answers through your own experiments.

Resources
I suggest that you open the two resources below at the same time and work through them in parallel:

• What is a Gene? (the investigation)
  The investigation uses an integrated date/programming environment called BioBIKE to give you ready access to the genes of a bacterium. It is divided into four parts:
   
  1. Genes and gene coordinates
  2. What is the beginning of a gene?
  3. What determines the beginning of a protein-encoding gene?
  4. What is the end of a gene?
  
  
• Companion to What is a Gene
  This presentation helps you get past some of the pitfalls presented by BioBIKE

To turn in
Each section of the investigation comes with embedded questions, but they are primarily to help guide you. You're free to turn in any of your responses to these questions if you want feedback on them, but the major task is (in general):

1. Describe every major question you've asked
2. Describe how you addressed the question, in sufficient detail that someone could repeat your efforts
3. Present the result you got and/or the observation you made
4. Interpret the result/observation in light of the question you asked

For step 2, you will frequently describe the BioBIKE function you used. You might do this by presenting a screenshot, but it is easier and more efficient of space to give a text representation of the function. You can get such a representation by using the SHOW-CODE tool in the Action Menu.

For example, clicking SHOW-CODE of the following function

yields (SEQUENCE-OF (GENES-OF AVAR) TO 10)

• For Part I (Preliminaries), address questions 4a, 5a, and P1 through P4, as described above.
• For Parts II, III, and IV, you decide what questions you consider major. Relate your efforts as described above.