Hello Ecologgers, I'm developing data analysis exercises for an undergraduate course I'll be teaching on molecular ecology, and I'm interested in any ideas or materials you might be willing to share. These exercises are intended to give students experience with some basic analyses of various kinds of molecular genetic data. I'd like to use real sequence and/or genotype data from interesting/important studies that have already been published. I'm imagining framing the biological question(s) and helping the students explore the data before reading the paper, and then reading the paper as a class to see how the students' results and interpretations compare to those presented in the paper. I don't expect the students will have had much prior exposure to molecular data, so the dataset(s) should be relatively simple (not too large or messy), and the results should be clear and easy to interpret. I'm thinking of using MEGA to explore sequencing data, and any number of population genetic programs (e.g, Genepop, Arlequin, Genodive, Genalex, Structure) to explore genotyping data. If you have developed or implemented such exercises in the past, or if you have ideas on how they might be most effectively designed, or if you have or know of datasets that might work well, your feedback would be much appreciated.
Please send any replies directly to me, and I will summarize any useful information I receive and post it back to the list. Thanks, Jason Andras [email protected]
