Pirates, Proteins & Penguins

Lab 5

This lab marks an important turning point in your computer science journey. It’s time to work with some real data! You have seen many manufactured problems that were designed to exercise the fundamentals of problem solving in Python. With those fundamentals under your belt, you are ready to tackle some real data science. The main parts of this lab will focus on the problems of protein sequence alignment and data summarization—both of which involve the manipulation of strings and lists. Time to get our hands dirty!

Goals
  • Practice manipulating strings and lists
  • Learn how to perform basic protein sequence alignment
  • Learn how to summarize data from a large study
README

Honor Code Reminders:

  • Discussing high-level ideas with other students is encouraged, but only show your actual code to course staff (professors/lab helpers/tutors). The only exception is the warmup, which is to be completed in pairs.
  • Consulting online resources other than assigned reading or documentation provided by the lab instructions is prohibited. Course staff will be happy to answer any questions you have.
  • Use of generative AI for any reason is not allowed. This includes for both writing code and for debugging or reformatting code you wrote.