Welcome to the CGDS Core Blog
This is the new home for news, workshop announcements, and tutorials from the MDI Biological Laboratory's Comparative Genomics and Data Science Core.
Blog
News, workshop announcements, and tutorials from the MDI Biological Laboratory's Comparative Genomics and Data Science Core.
Workshop: Learn to Use R, Nov. 2, 2026
This workshop is open to all members of INBRE network institutions. No experience in R is necessary. Continue reading to learn more.
We Want to Hear From You: Data Science Survey
Are you at an INBRE network institution? Tell us about your data science needs and the trainings and formats you'd like most. The survey is short and anonymous.
Resources for learning to operate a computer from the command-line
Much of the work that we do in computational biology operates from what we call “the command-line” interface. The command-line allows us to carry out nearly all of the operations that you can with a graphical user interface (GUI), with its “point-and-click” interface. In many cases, (e.g., in launching large-scale computational processes, such as needed for genomic data analysis), it is much more efficient to do so from the command-line, especially if you are going to be using cloud-based or other remote computing resources.
Getting to the command-line on a Mac OS Computer with Terminal
From Spotlight Search, type terminal. The terminal application should be the top result.
Getting to the Command-line on Windows with PowerShell
From the Start Menu, search PowerShell.
External Resources for learning R
Here are a few links of interest for those who would like to learn about R. We have looked at most of these and can help if need be, but they really are good enough for you try yourself
Understanding sequence files: fasta and fastq
There are two primary file formats for sequence data that are generally used in computational biology/bionformatics.
Spaces, commas, and other things that go bump in filenames (at the command-line)
Today’s tip for those of you who are trying to learn to work from the command-line (or who might ever send a file to me).
When it comes to filenames, spaces, commas, and pretty much anything that isn’t either a letter (a-z, A-Z), number (0-9), dash (-), underscore (_), or period (.) are EVIL and SHOULD BE AVOIDED.