Hi, and welcome to the Capstone Project for the Genomic Data Science Specialization. I'm Kasper Hansen, one of the co-directors of the Genomic Data Science Specialization. You've now completed seven classes, giving you skills in genomic data science. And in the next eight weeks, you're going to take this skill set, and you're going to synthesize it and complete one big project, where you're going to take a lot of your skills together and pair yourself into one coherent unit. This project is built around real data, and we're trying to answer a real question. We're doing this together with researchers at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, which is a specialized research institute focusing exclusively on brain development. We're going to be [COUGH] looking at Transcriptome sequencing data or RNA-sequencing data from human brains, and we're going to ask the question what is different between fetal brain and adult brain? In other words, which transcripts or which expression patterns are associated with developement of the adult brain. The evaluation of this project is going to be peer review. In this presentation you have had a little, but ultimately limited experience with peer review. But the essence of it is that the deliverables you're going to make are going to be evaluated by your peers. And you're going to try to convince your peers that you've done a suitable job of answering the question. In this class, it's going to be important to pace yourself. You're going to address a big open-ended question. The biggest computational bottleneck in this class is going to be alignment or taking the on-sequencing data and putting that into a genomic context. The deliverables for that particular aim is due in week 4, but we suggest that you start on this process far earlier. This might be something that takes a long time to get it through. You can do this by using Galaxy Main. You can rent servers on Amazon Web Services. You can try and do it on your laptop. We don't really care. We just want you to do the job and deal with the computation issues you may have on the way. So start with this in good time, not in week 4. So welcome to the Capstone Project. We are pumped up about this project and we hope that you'll have a lot of fun trying to apply your skills into a real life setting.
