First day of class

Today was the first day of the rest of our semester. We discussed the layout and format of the course, which will, in large part, follow the story arc of Pevsner's "Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics". The course will be a mix of lecture, computer time, and some experiments in lab. We hope to blur the distinction between the lab and lecture parts of the course by discussing computer-based work in class, and using lab time to introduce new concepts when appropriate. Finally, we briefly discussed an old paper from my time as a postdoc in Larry Goldstein's lab (click on title of post for link), which shows that bioinformatics is not necessarily and end in itself, but can be used to develop hypotheses and experimental strategies.