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I am a beginner level programmer preparing for the interview in medical research company. Job sounds damn interesting and I would like to get there. To show my skills and interest, I want to write a program related to the topic.

I think, statistical analysis is quite used in that field, isn't it? What would you suggest, as idea for demo program? Calculation of basic statistical parameters of input data?

UPDATE: @chl: my background: beginner Silverlight programmer, with basic (college) level of statistics; my intentions: small application, that shows I know Silverlight & I have interest in medical research

@onestop: company's area of activity: research in proteins, metabolics, central nervous system; job specification: I have just basic requirements, and there is Silverlight knowledge listed

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I don't think there's a single best answer, so this has probably to be made CW. Moreover, I think you need to clarify what you intend to do, and what's your background. – chl♦ Dec 29 '10 at 18:52
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Not sure this is answerable without a bit more info on the company's area(s) of activity and the job specification. 'Medical research' and 'programmer' are a bit vague. – onestop Dec 29 '10 at 21:18

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Write a script that aligns short DNA fragments (25-100 basepairs) to an existing genome.

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...always remembering that you are reinventing the wheel with that: use it as a "proof-of-concept" that you can program, if they want to align short DNA fragments to a genome they would use BLAST. – nico Dec 30 '10 at 14:56
@nico, I think @cespinoza implied programing something relevant to the hot topic re-sequencing application (a.k.a. High-Throughput sequencing, Next Generation Sequencing). Blast would not work for that. You want to look at something like Mosaik, SOAP Aligner, ABySS, Bowtie, BWA, or Maq – Aleksandr Levchuk Feb 22 '11 at 5:15
@Aleksandr: of course I cannot read the mind of cespinoza... but aligning 25bp to an existing genome sounds a lot like checking where some primers bind to the DNA to me... But, again, I may be wrong... I haven't done more than a handful of PCRs in the last few years, and I moved my interests to other fields of biology ;) – nico Feb 22 '11 at 6:21

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