Bioinformatics and Genomics
Introduction/ Overview


Welcome to our Bioinformatics and Genomics course blog. The goal of the course was to learn about genetics and its applications in research. For two weeks during Janplan, thirteen students with a variety of science backgrounds and our professor, Andrea Tilden, visited Jackson Labs in Bar Harbor, ME. During our visit to Jax, we stayed at the Highseas, a mansion build in 1912 and used by Jackson for housing summer students since 1951. We traveled to and from Jackson in two black Suburbans, which someone commented made us look like the FBI. Though, unlike the FBI, we enjoyed jamming out to Taylor Swift and other popular singers in the mornings.
Throughout these two weeks, we studied mouse genetics focusing on Parkinson’s disease caused by a mutation in the Lrrk2 gene. Charlie Wray, the organizer of the course, had many interesting speakers come to lecture us. We learned about a variety of topics from how to handle mice, to ethics involved in research animals, to creating a transgenic mouse and sequencing its genome. My personal favorite was learning about high throughput sequencing. During lab time on the first week, we got hands on practice doing DNA isolation and replication. On the second week, we created a DNA library which was sequenced on a MiSeq, and then, we learned to analyze the data using galaxy. Additionally, as a class we created a power point presentation on all the information we learned during the first week. Though we were in lectures or lab from 9:00am to around 4:00pm each day, we did have some free time to go sightseeing and downtime.
A normal day for us consisted of breakfast at Highseas, arriving at Jackson labs around 9:00 am, spending the day in lectures or in the training lab, having lunch around noon with the various speakers, and returning to Highseas for a delicious home cooked meal. On the weekends and during the evening, many of us played games, went to the gym, and watched movies. I learned to play some great games including Settlers of Catan. Throughout JanPlan, all thirteen of got along well and bonded over our shared love of science.