Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
 
 

README.md

Week 2 — Sequence Alignment

Objectives

  • Understand the types of alignments: global (Needleman–Wunsch), local (Smith–Waterman), and semi-global.
  • Learn to use substitution matrices (PAM, BLOSUM).
  • Practice with Biopython and external tools (BLAST, Clustal Omega).
  • Develop skills for implementing the basic alignment algorithms.

Part 1 — Demo / Exercises

Run

  • demo01_pairwise_biopython.py — global and local alignment using Biopython (pairwise2).
  • demo02_distance_matrix.py — compute sequence distances (p-distance, Hamming) from FASTA files. Complete and run
  • ex02_global_nw.py — implementation skeleton for global alignment (TODO).
  • ex03_local_sw.py — implementation skeleton for local alignment (TODO). Note: Use the datasets downloaded in Lab 1 (from data/work/<handle>/lab01/).

Deliverables

*Your Pull Request (PR) must include:

  • The file labs/02_alignment/<github_handle>_notes.md containing:
    • which datasets you used (e.g., TP53 vs. BRCA1),
    • a short reflection: “When is global alignment preferred over local alignment?”
    • The completed exercises, saved under:
  • labs/02_alignment/submissions/<github_handle>/ex02_global_nw.py
  • labs/02_alignment/submissions/<github_handle>/ex03_local_sw.py
  • The completed checklist from the PR template.

Next Week

  • We will extend the analysis to NGS reads (FASTQ → mapping → variant calling).
  • The alignments obtained this week will be used to validate mapping and NGS analyses.
  • See Week 3 — NGS Analysis

Learning Outcomes

  • Understand the difference between global and local alignment.
  • Use Biopython for simple pairwise alignments.
  • Implement the basic NW and SW algorithms.
  • Interpret results and compare them with BLAST / Clustal outputs.

Resources