2020 was an interesting year, not only was I stuck in a pandemic but I was able to be a virtual intern at Milrd, not once but TWICE, thanks to Minds of Jamaica.
Like most teenagers, I was in the middle of lockdown with my phone and the internet as my primary source of entertainment. Whilst scrolling on Instagram, I saw a post that immediately got my attention.
After consultation and finishing the onboarding process, I was ready and set to be an intern in the Virtual Training Project in Metagenomics: Characterizing the Microbiome of the World’s Mass Transit Systems.
At first, I was really intimidated by the new software and platforms that I was about to explore such as Slack, AWS instance, Putty and Terminal/bash, among others. If not for anything else, I appreciate this internship as it made me more comfortable with not getting it right the first couple of times and troubleshooting until you find what works for you.
As an early bloomer and fast learner in primary through to high school, most things came to me easily or at a lesser effort than the average. Thus I sometimes faced an internal dilmema where if I am not good at something the first few tries, then it wasn't for me.
Fortunately, I placed at myth to rest and was able to explore a new field - Metagenomics.
Metagenomics is the process by which the metagenome is generated: it involves sequencing all DNA extracted from a sample followed by assembly of sequence reads or mapping them to a reference database followed by annotation of the genes.
Before I was to dive into the technical aspects of the internship, I had to learn about the topic from a macro scale to the little nuances that I will be working with on a micro-scale. This was done by Paul Scheid from Milrd and an AI mentor program called "Cody"
To summarize, both internships entailed using our computers and laptops from our very homes to clean (trim) data and organize it into a useful format. Easier said than done.
The raw data was extensive and mostly unintelligible to the average human being. Using a series of programs and writing codes, I was able to construct the raw sequencing data into graphs and figures that will make it easy for someone to get a sense of our data at a glance.
Thanks to the Minds Of Jamaica and Milrd for providing me with this opportunity to learn about this amazing field. My first internship was around March and I was back again in November for another taste. This time on the topic of - Viral Genomics + COVID-19.
See below for highlights and the certificates I received at the end of the course.
Additional Resources
Introduction to Metagenomics (blog post written by me, shortly after the first internship)
Illumina Sequence (5 min youtube video on the technology used in sequencing the data)
Comments