Perl and Genomics

Perl is man’s best friend.  Well, maybe not, but it’s my best friend, anyway.  Using Perl, I’ve been able to:

♠ make a computer-based car stereo that has all my CDs copied onto its hard drive, so every song, band, and album is instantly available all the time.  (Well, I don’t quite have all my CDs copied onto it yet -- only about 250 or 300 so far.  It takes time, you know...)

♣ make the scripts that run this website, like the blogger/messageboard script you’re reading right now, along with a login script, a mailinglist script, my visitorlog/stats scripts, and various others.

♥ make an interface for creating webpages from photos that’s easy enough for my mom to use, along with the scripts to display those photos as a slideshow or in frames (and the blog/msgboard script fits in to allow user comments on the photos).

And now, I just started a job using Perl (along with other web-development concepts like CGI programming, CSS design, mysql databases, etc) to help design/maintain a database and website system in one of the bio labs here on campus.  Professors and grad students here are collaborating with people at Cornell and the U of Florida on a project to sequence flower genomes, and Perl plays a big role in enabling the project.

Most of the bio is mostly over my head, but I’m learning it as I go.  Genomics is certainly interesting stuff, especially with stories about the supposed successful creation of a human clone making the news nowadays.  And while I’m working, I get to hear the researchers make jokes about the "millions of years of evolution" these plants have gone through (well, they don’t know that they are jokes... but they’re funny).