Final Project
Final Project Materials
Final Project Materials will be made available here as well as Brightspace.
Past Final Project Submissions
Below are examples of final project submissions from previous years. Please note that the guidelines and rubric have changed for Spring 2026 — these examples are provided only as a general reference. They are intended to illustrate the green, blue, and black trail projects, not to serve as templates for formatting or content.
Green Trail Examples
For the green trail, the goal is to recreate a figure or figure panel from a publication. For example, in the Green Trail Example #7, this student was able to recreate Figure 1 from Xian et al. 2022
Blue Trail Examples
For the blue trail, the goal is compare bioinformatic programs and contrast results. In the Blue Trail Example #1 & #2, the students successfully compared a genomic (STAR) vs transcriptomic (SALMON) aligner or fast-aligner (HISAT2). In Blue Trail Example #2, the students used nf-core/rnaseq to compare multiple aligners at once.
Black Trail Examples
For the black trail, the goal is to test an original hypothesis and to generate results not seen in the published manuscript. For example, in Black Trail Example #3 the dataset contained samples isolated from kidneys from bears pre- and post-hibernation. The student attempted to answer which DEGs in bear kidneys are related to cardiac pathways as there was a strong connection between the heart and kidneys. Please note that all of these analysis contained multiple parts (multiple HTMLs) since multiple comparisons were tested.