Twitter BlogIn lieu of a traditional blog, we will be frequently tweeting our progress, using this account:
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UpdatesSummer 2015We began our summer by presenting a poster at the Great Lakes Bioinformatics conference. We all greatly enjoyed the conference and feel that our poster presentation was good practice. After the conference, we established a schedule and expectations for summer research. The summer so far has been very productive. We have established a research pipeline, pictured here:
More information about this pipeline can be found in our group midsummer report. Currently, we have run test files through Trimmomatic, Tophat/Bowtie, and Cufflinks. Most of our data, however, is in between the fastQC and Trimmomatic area. Almost all data have been run through fastQC and a lesser portion has been run through Trimmomatic. We have also discussed automating this pipeline using a python script. In addition, we will be mentoring a high school student for the second half of the summer.
Spring 2015Team BioIFly has had some setbacks recently. First, the computer where we were storing most of our data crashed. Next, the tools we set out to use proved uncooperative. After many hours of wrestling with the broken computer and DNA Subway's Green Line program, BioIFly has been slowed down. We are still working hard and hope to be back on track soon.
While we are regathering ourselves, here are some recent updates: Emma and Amanda both recently attended the 2015 ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference in Boston. The conference was a fantastic learning experience and they both really enjoyed their time. While they mostly attended the same talks and presentations, they did attend some individually. Amanda had a fantastic time learning about Lego robots and attended a great workshop on how to make a great resume presented by Google. Emma was quite taken with a panel on humanitarian applications for open source. She also enjoyed the opportunity to hear about multidisciplinary career paths in computer science since she will be pursuing a research career in bioinformatics. They both learned a lot and had a fun time meeting the other participants. From here, we are excited to get into the meat of our project, as this past year has been spent sifting through large data sets of Avian transcriptomes and researching computational tools. We are also working on preparing a poster for the Grace Hopper Conference in October. In April we are presenting at the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium and at the Loyola Undergraduate Research Symposium. In May, we will be presenting at the Great Lakes Bioinformatics Conference. We are very excited for all of our upcoming research presentations. |