Achievement

The third outcome was training in computational analysis of large-scale DNA sequence data sets. This work is in progress at the time of this report, as the trainees are poised to get their own data related to the salt marsh sampling experiment, so will begin to learn real world analyses in more depth than has been provided by the examples presented in lectures. IGERT faculty and others in computer science and in genomics and molecular biology have given lectures on the Unix operating system, programming in Python, and basic file management of the data files that come off the Illumina instrument. The students gained familiarity with these new techniques, but the full working knowledge will come in the next month as the students analyze their own data.