DNA60: A special bioinformatics challenge from Genome Biology: THE WINNERS!!!!
It has been a fun week, and it seems that our contestants have very much enjoyed the DNA60IFX Bioinformatics Challenge - as we have also! The challenge was held to mark the 60th anniversary of the double helix; don't forget to read our special DNA Day content for more on this landmark anniversary.
We would very much like to thank Mike Schatz and James Taylor for curating this challenge for us. They really have put in a lot of hard work, so if you enjoyed the challenge, then please take time to thank them too!
In total 24 people sent us the correct answer before the winners were announced at 8 pm Eagle Time (and several people after!).
Finally, the answers, including full solutions and scripts, are available here.
The overall winner
Sven-Eric Schelhorn (Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Germany) - 19 minutes
Congratulations to Sven-Eric, who wins an iPad!
You can download the Python script that Sven-Eric used for the final step here, and read about his thoughts on the challenge (together with those of the curators) here.
2nd place
Kevin Wang (University of Chicago, USA) - 19 minutes
Congratulations to Kevin (an undergraduate physics student!), who wins his choice of Beyond The Genome registration or a one-year Genome Biology subscription.
3rd place
Gustavo Lacerda (Campinas State University, Brazil) - 24 minutes
Congratulations to Gustavo, who wins his choice of Beyond The Genome registration or a one-year Genome Biology subscription.
Honorable Mentions
4th place: Osvaldo Reis (Campinas State University, Brazil) - 29 minutes
5th place: Paul Costea (EMBL, Germany) - 30 minutes
6th place: Chris Hill (University of Maryland, USA) - 40 minutes
7th place: Irina Astrovskaya (University of Maryland (College Park), USA) - 41 minutes
8th place: Brian Kolterman (self-employed data scientist, USA (formerly of CSHL)) - 58 minutes
9th place: Wei Li (Harvard University, USA) - 58 minutes
10th place: Andrew Elliott (University of Oxford, UK) - 60 minutes
We will be happy to update affiliations if any of the above get in touch - please email naomi.attar@genomebiology.com
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Finally, we would like to thank YOU for participating. Everyone who took part was a real winner in our book: you had fun (we hope) and experienced some group bioinformatics - perhaps you even learned something!
Want to start the challenge from the beginning? Here's our introduction page.
