**What is your prior experience in this discipline?**
I don't have a lot a lot of experience working with 'omics data directly, but I have collected samples on research cruises for ASVs and metatranscriptomics. I have also taken a marine molecular ecology course in the past. I do have a lot of experience with command line tools, BASH, R, and Python. 

**What do you hope to get out of this class?**
I hope to learn modern tools and APIs used in bioinformatics, and how to use them to answer my research question. I'm very excited on working on my project and hope it can tie in with one of my PhD chapters.

**This class is strongly rooted in an independent project related to genomic analyses. What specific project do you have in mind? If you do not have any data or preference, data can be provided / aquired. If you do not have a specfic project, what approach would you like to master as part of this class?**
Our lab collected community transcripts from a research cruise in the N. Pacific and equator in 2023. My research involves quantifying the growth rates and productivity of a small cyanobacteria population, _Prochlorococcus_. Through our flow cytometry, I observed a decrease in growth rate during the afternoon on several days, suggesting photoinhibition. I would like to map our transcripts to a published reference genome to identify and quantify the genes related to photoinhibition and compare them to different locations on our cruise transect.

**What are two things you found most useful from the reading?**
1. Version control is very important.
2. Staying organized and writing documentation as you work on a project will make your life a lot easier.