To be perfectly honest, the chimera exercise was extremely difficult for me. I had a really hard time understanding the directions just because this is not something that I had ever done before. The commands were difficult to understand, and trying to remember the different commands that we had used throughout the previous exercise was also something that was difficult. Something that would have helped me was having a video of one of the instructors going through the commands and explaining it so that I could have another way of learning and understanding – since with online classes its a little more difficult to ask questions. However, while it was not an easy feat, I think that I did end up understanding everything by the end of it. In fact, I developed really great appreciation for the Usearch program. I had used BLAST in the past, however, I truly understood the benefits of the Usearch program. I think that with a little bit of practice with the commands, I can definitely use this in the near future. Additionally, I think the chimera exercise also brought my awareness to what chimeras are and why they are important. I did not even think about this concept before this class so I am really happy to have learned about chimeras and how to identify them in nucleotide sequences.
