I'm a professor of Computer Science looking to learn the basics of sequencing technology. In particular, I'm interested in understanding the various file formats.
The C.S. stuff is straightforward for me, but the bio stuff is rather... challenging: I have a high-school level of understanding of biology, which only gets me so far. For example, I know what a nucleotide is, I understand the basic idea of how codons produce proteins, and I know roughly how DNA differs from RNA. But this newer terminology around sequencing technology is hard to learn because there doesn't seem to be a good set of references. For example, I searched for a while trying to learn what a CIGAR string is, only to get tons of smoking and Freud references. The lexicon you folks use is unfortunately borrowed from mainstream English and therefore hard to google ("lane", "read", "run").
My question: is there a good reference, free or not, that quickly takes one through the lexicon required to absorb file-format descriptions? I have already read Larry Hunter's excellent "The Processes of Life" but it doesn't spend much time specifically on sequencing.
The C.S. stuff is straightforward for me, but the bio stuff is rather... challenging: I have a high-school level of understanding of biology, which only gets me so far. For example, I know what a nucleotide is, I understand the basic idea of how codons produce proteins, and I know roughly how DNA differs from RNA. But this newer terminology around sequencing technology is hard to learn because there doesn't seem to be a good set of references. For example, I searched for a while trying to learn what a CIGAR string is, only to get tons of smoking and Freud references. The lexicon you folks use is unfortunately borrowed from mainstream English and therefore hard to google ("lane", "read", "run").
My question: is there a good reference, free or not, that quickly takes one through the lexicon required to absorb file-format descriptions? I have already read Larry Hunter's excellent "The Processes of Life" but it doesn't spend much time specifically on sequencing.
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