This workshop provides an introduction to National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) databases commonly used by life scientists. The workshop is specifically designed for those with no or little knowledge of bioinformatics, and begins with a brief tutorial on molecular biology fundamentals and the basic theory behind DNA and protein sequencing. We will then move on to the effective use of NCBI's bibliographic, nucleotide, protein, gene, and genome databases, the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST), and /Cn3D/, NCBI's 3-D visualization tool for proteins.