Genome Assembly Programming Challenge

Offered byCoursera

Genome Assembly Programming Challenge
at
Coursera
Overview

Duration	17 hours
Start from	Start Now
Total fee	Free
Mode of learning	Online
Difficulty level	Advanced
Official Website	Explore Free Course
Credential	Certificate

Genome Assembly Programming Challenge
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Coursera
Highlights

Shareable Certificate Earn a Certificate upon completion
100% online Start instantly and learn at your own schedule.
Course 6 of 6 in the Data Structures and Algorithms Specialization
Flexible deadlines Reset deadlines in accordance to your schedule.
Advanced Level
Approx. 17 hours to complete
English Subtitles: Arabic, French, Portuguese (European), Italian, Vietnamese, German, Russian, English, Spanish

Genome Assembly Programming Challenge
at
Coursera
Course details

More about this course

In Spring 2011, thousands of people in Germany were hospitalized with a deadly disease that started as food poisoning with bloody diarrhea and often led to kidney failure. It was the beginning of the deadliest outbreak in recent history, caused by a mysterious bacterial strain that we will refer to as E. coli X. Soon, German officials linked the outbreak to a restaurant in Lübeck, where nearly 20% of the patrons had developed bloody diarrhea in a single week. At this point, biologists knew that they were facing a previously unknown pathogen and that traditional methods would not suffice ? computational biologists would be needed to assemble and analyze the genome of the newly emerged pathogen.
To investigate the evolutionary origin and pathogenic potential of the outbreak strain, researchers started a crowdsourced research program. They released bacterial DNA sequencing data from one of a patient, which elicited a burst of analyses carried out by computational biologists on four continents. They even used GitHub for the project: https://github.com/ehec-outbreak-crowdsourced/BGI-data-analysis/wiki
The 2011 German outbreak represented an early example of epidemiologists collaborating with computational biologists to stop an outbreak. In this Genome Assembly Programming Challenge, you will follow in the footsteps of the bioinformaticians investigating the outbreak by developing a program to assemble the genome of the E. coli X from millions of overlapping substrings of the E.coli X genome.