Sequence Alignment & BLAST Live
The most fundamental operation in bioinformatics. Homology, global and local pairwise alignment (Needleman-Wunsch and Smith-Waterman), substitution matrices, running and correctly reading BLAST, and multiple sequence alignment, with a working in-browser alignment demo and a graded final assessment.
Start Level 1 →Sequence Alignment & BLAST — Advanced Live
The professional depth, after Level 1: affine gap penalties, the Karlin-Altschul statistics behind the E-value, why BLAST is a heuristic that can miss real homologs, and detecting remote homology with PSI-BLAST, profile HMMs (HMMER), and structure search (Foldseek).
Start Level 2 →Genome Browsers & IGV Coming soon
The hands-on skill of actually looking at your data: load a reference, a BAM, and a VCF into IGV, read the pileup, and judge a variant with your own eyes. The visual literacy every NGS analyst needs.
In developmentVariant Annotation & Interpretation Coming soon
What happens after variant calling: annotating a VCF (VEP, ANNOVAR), predicting a variant's effect, and using population frequencies and ACMG-style criteria to judge whether a variant actually matters. The interpretation layer that turns a VCF into an answer.
In development