This was my first time messing around with sequencing data. In the past my only experience with coding has been in Stats, which was less than thrilling. However, I found this process to be very interesting. As the papers we read this week have summed up, the methodologies of sequencing make all the difference in determining the makeup of a microbial community – so it was great to become more familiar with this process. I would not have said this was an interest of mine before this but I actually found this to be fairly rewarding… for now, I’m sure in the future it might become less fun. I think the data analysis I have done for Stats I offered the only intuition I have for this project, which is not a lot other than coming to terms with the frustration of typos. For some reason I (at least I believe that I) did not struggle to understand what we were doing with the data, the most difficult part to understand was the actual sequencing the Illumina MiSeq was doing. Flow cells and making libraries are all very foreign to me. Of course, all the commands were new as well. I don’t get to do this kind of stuff at work and in the past I have only been told to think about data that has already been sequenced, not about how we have chosen to sequence it, and definitely not about how that process runs. Did I have any eureka moments about how MiSeq works? ….Can’t say I did.
