PI Langmead and Ph.D. student Jacob Pritt will be teaching a new Coursera course titled “Algorithms for DNA sequencing.” The first four-week session is scheduled to start on June 15, 2015.

DNA sequencing is now a ubiquitous tool in life science. You can observe this trend just by reading the news. This course examines the computational problems that come with this onslaught of DNA sequencing data. How do we take a huge collection of DNA “puzzle pieces” and assemble them into a genome? How do we make it quick and easy to find a DNA “needle” in an enormous genomic “haystack”? We will spend the bulk of the course understanding the algorithms and data structures that underlie software tools for analyzing sequencing data. The course is also an opporunity to practice programming skills and gain exposure to basic algorithms and data structures.