My project uses computational biology methods, so basically I spend most of my time on my laptop while I am in lab. My time is divided between reading papers, coding, troubleshooting and googling how to use certain softwares. The papers I read are usually related to either background information for my project, such as previous experiments using viruses for cell-type specific gene expression, or about computational biology methods, in order to determine which softwares would work best to complete specific parts of my project. I have to spend a substantial amount of time learning how to code for specific programs. For example, when I was figuring out how to use the program bedtools, to analyze a large data set, I had to learn how to do command line coding. This proved to be much more of a challenge than I expected, because I also had to learn how to properly install the program and then troubleshoot figure out why the files were not working with the program (they were in a slightly incorrect format).
I also spent a large amount of time on the UCSC genome browser, searching for ATAC-seq peaks unique to a certain cell type.
Now that I have identified putative enhancer regions from the published data, my time in the lab will likely shift to more wet lab based experiments, which I am looking forward to (even though I just got the hang of command line coding).
