This new course is based on the concept that students can advance their own research goals by learning to write simple software to help gather, organize and analyze genomic datasets. This course is offered for graduate students with little prior knowledge of computer programming, who want to acquire basic program skills in managing, integrating and analyzing datasets of genomic information. The course will teach the fundamentals of the UNIX operating system, the Perl programming language, and large-scale sequence analysis. The course will offer formal lectures on UNIX shell commands and Perl scripting, combined with a workshop format that will allow students to advance their programming skills in a group setting. Course work will include a series of problem sets drawn from common scenarios in genomic data acquisition, integration and analysis.
Class size is limited, please contact the instructor via e-mail before the first meeting.
Meeting time and place information will be sent via e-mail. Semester Formal proof that variation at the genomic level accounts for phenotypic differences among individuals is particularly straightforward when the gene under suspicion exhibits deletions or frameshift mutations that are incompatible with formation of a normal product. Increasingly, however, scientists are confronted with situations where establishing the functional significance of a molecular variant may be very challenging. We will review examples of such sitiuations and examine approaches that can be used to demonstrate the causal relationship between gene variation and function, with particular emphasis on the analysis of genetic determinants of human disease.