One of the marvels of modern science, made possible by the use of sophisticated computer algorithms, is the famous Human Genome Project. Some background and related resources are available in the slides on genome reassembly from fragments. The idea of reassembling a long sequence from many overlapping fragments of the whole is not new. It is the basis for an early 20th-century technique called dendrochronology, where it has enabled the creation of year-by-year records of tree-ring growth patterns in some geographical regions over intervals as long as several thousand years. These sequences have been used to pinpoint the dates of construction for ancient structures with wooden members such as the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park in the southwestern U. S. However, the ability to reassemble very long patterns such as the sequence of some 3 billion nucleotides in a strand of human DNA — from millions of fragments — is new. This "scaling up" of the basic sequence-reassembly concept was crucial to the success of the Human Genome Project. How can this sort of thing be done? That is the question you will explore a bit in this project. Setup