Biology Outreach
University of St Andrews staff visited Kilgraston on Friday June 6th to help an enthusiastic group of sixth form pupils begin to explore the mysteries of computational biology.
Dr Daniel Barker and Dr Heleen Plaisier of the University of St Andrews’ School of Biology brought 9 Raspberry Pi computers loaded with “4273pi”, a customised version of the Linux operating system developed for teaching and learning computational biology at the University of St Andrews.
Pupils were guided through practical examples to gain hands-on experience of research-grade computing applied to biological problems. One pupil remarked : “I liked the programming – making files and commands – because it was really interesting to see how computers actually work”.
In the afternoon, pupils learned about discovering where genes actually are, within genome sequences – using a case-study based on real research happening at the University of St Andrews.
The full blog post on the visit, written by the University of St Andrews, is available on their website.
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