Writing short article; clueless about which bioinformatics tools to use.

[Melissabee]

Hi, I am a chemistry b.s. transitioning into biology doing a post bac internship in genetics and have been given a very simple and general assignments but I have no idea of which resources to utilize. I have almost no background in biology informatics (can do protein blast, played around with genevestigator, but that's all--totally willing to learn)

I am not asking for somebody to do my assignment, obviously-- I just need pointers on where to find that information to write the aritcle and how to use them.

My assignment is to generate a short aritcle on the gene family in which the Arabidopsis gene At3g53990 is one of the members,

-- discovery of this gene family
--Definition of this gene family (conserved domain, key residues, etc.
--Overview of known functions of this gene family in other organisms
---Overview of this gene family in plants (homologues, expression, functions, etc.)

Where would I start? I tried googling but I don't understand many of the webistes that list information. Would this part of the Universal Stress protein family? What about gene family?
So confused..!

Thanks so much everybody!

Also, does anybody have any links to websites explaining how to use these tools? Like, i can use genevestigator, but I don't know what any of the charts means--like what correlates to what, etc.