Spring 2022 - Practical Computing for Life Scientists

Course Title: Practical Computing For Life Scientists Course Number: PLPT 892 - Section 009 Credits: 4 Location: Beadle E106 Scheduled Time: Tuesday - Thursday, 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM

The advent of new technologies increasing the throughput and complexity of data acquisition has become common place in the last decade. It can be daunting to deal with this deluge of data. The goal of this course is to introduce computational techniques for those studying the life sciences. We’ll focus on learning techniques to streamline and automate data analysis in a reproducible manner. Most of the course material will focus on dealing with data in the form of text files, which include nucleotide and protein sequence data.

Analysis approaches and topics that will be covered in the course: • Unix commands, basic computer scripting, and pipeline creation • Text formatting for recording and communicating data • Maintenance and quality control of tabular data • Processing of data via command line tools and scripting • Version control for collaboration and archiving • Cloud computer and distributed data analysis resources • Visualization techniques and data re-organization using R • Alignment-based assessment of nucleotide similarity and database matching • Assembly-based methods for genome reconstruction • Population and SNP based approaches for genotyping

Course Requirements: A desire to learn and not be discouraged in the face of computational adversity.

Access to a Linux-based laptop (Apple BSD or any flavor of Linux) is highly recommended!

NO PRIOR COMPUTATIONAL BACKGROUND NECESSARY!!!

Classroom photo from course in spring 2019: