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Bioinformatics Summer 2017

The Seeds of Change 2017 Bioinformatics Research will be held at the University of Georgia Costa Rica Campus High in the Monteverde Cloud Forest. The project is led by Gabriel Vargus from the University of Chicago Coleman Lab where bioinformatics are made the focus of research. We will use the supercomputers at the University of California Berkeley which house many of the world's genetic databases associated with the Department of Energy Joint Genomic Institutes IMG systems.

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July 06, 2017

Campus

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Day 1 Travel Day

July 07, 2017

Hello fellow followers, We are happy to report that we have arrived; we are mentally broken, but safe. After sixteen hours of traveling it has been nice to settle in. We stopped for lunch at a local restaurant and had a delicious meal with either chicken or fish. It was very warm when we stopped and very humid. After lunch we got back on the bus for a long four hour drive up to the cloud forest. We passed many terrific landscapes along with a cute, little tourist town right at the beginning of Monteverde. When we finally arrived at UGA, we got into the bunks (which are very homey and quite comfortable) and headed to dinner. At dinner they served delicious rice, beans, a cookie, and some amazing hot chocolate! We are happy to go to bed, but it is a bitter-sweet moment because Jenna and Hayden have to get up at 5:30 to go milk cows… wooo hooo (note the sarcasm). Anyway, it’s been fun so far and we are excited to go to bed, so adios! Jenna and Hayde

Day 4 Zip lining

July 10, 2017

This morning half of the group went “birding” (bird watching) at 6:30 before breakfast. After we ate, we headed to class in the Chachalaca classroom and continued work on our projects with a goal of answering two of our four questions. We had a quick coffee break at 10 before heading back to class and working until lunch. After lunch, we walked back to our cabinas to get ready for our afternoon of zip lining at a close zip lining park. A tram took us further up the mountain, deep into the cloud forest where we zip lined 200+ feet above the treetops. Today’s weather was fairly clear, and we were able to see past the forest and across to the the ocean. At the end of our amazing experience, we were offered an opportunity to “fall” off of the bridge. Everyone braved the drop: jumping off of the bridge, free falling for a few seconds, and ultimately being caught by a break before reaching the mats at the bottom. As our adrenaline rushes faded, we headed back to our cabinas and then went to

Day 5 Coffee Tour

July 11, 2017

Hello all, This morning half of the group went bird watching again at 6:30 . We saw more birds than the other group, and we even saw Capuchin Monkeys and an Agouti (A small capybara). After a breakfast of the ever so famous Arroz y Frijoles, we headed down to the classroom for morning science. Our main goal was to finish our 3rd diagrams and start work on our final posters. We had a quick break at 10, and by 10:20 we were back hard at work. Lunch couldn't come soon enough, and by noon we were chowing down. At 1 we hopped in the vans and took an incredibly short ride to San Luis, a local coffee farm and tour. Apparently they didn't have our reservation, but within a half an hour we were given a warm welcome by Victor, the owner. He didn't speak any English, so we had to have one of on-campus naturalists translate for him. We learned about the coffee tree itself, the antique methods in which it was prepared, and the more modern machine-dominated techniques. After th