Perl and Bioinformatics

Daniel Culver became interested in bioinformatics after finding a set of coding challenges in the subject on-line. Most of the problems were quite solvable using Perl's strengths.

In the talk, Daniel introduced the subject and gave a really quick overview of bioinformatics and a little biology. A fair amount of the work of bioinformatics revolves around manipulating and processing long strings of DNA bases. Perl's strong string processing support makes these chores quite easy. The discussion during the talk was quite lively. The discussion wandered through details of the biology and programming optimizations for the presented scripts. There was even a little talk of more advanced string processing algorithms from computer science.

The presentation introduced the Rosalind project, where Daniel found the on-line challenges. He also mentioned the BioPerl project, which has been a force in bioinformatics for years.

To keep the discussion from getting too dry, there were also pictures of kittens and squirrels.

The resources for the presentation are available.

• The slides are available as a PowerPoint deck.
• The files used in the presentation are available on GitHub.

We had 10 people attending this month. Once again, we'd like to thank HostGator, LLC. for providing the meeting space and food for the group.