July 3, 2021
The Yale undergraduates made history last week by attending the 1st Yale Undergraduate Workshop on Ancient DNA and Bioinformatics Methods (July 21-24), organized by Dr. Serena Tucci (Anthropology) and Dr. Gisella Caccone (EEB) and instructors Nicole Fusco, Patrick Reilly and Alysa Pomer. Students gained hands-on experience on cutting-edge protocols for ancient DNA extraction from bones and teeth, and different methods for next generation sequencing (NGS) library preparation. They learned shell scripting, high performance cluster computing (HPC) and the most commonly used bioinformatics tools for alignment and analysis of short-read NGS sequencing data.