I’m currently interning at Seven Bridges Genomics for a few weeks, which is awesome. They asked me to give a talk on the FM-Index–a highly compressed data structure that allows for efficient search queries. This is used for a fundamental step in the sequencing a genome, called alignment, in which you take a bunch of strings that are about 100 characters long that the chemistry spits out and try to fit them together into one long meaningful genome. (For more about alignment, check out this awesome blog post by Nate Meyvis.)

Some SBG people wanted me to share my slides, but the slides that I typically make are completely unsharable. So, I made a video, and now my lucky blog readers get the opportunity to listen to me talk for 40 minutes about the FM-Index! (You know… if you’re into that sort of thing…) Here’s the link.

(You should probably watch it in 720p or 1080p because otherwise some of the text is annoyingly blurry for some reason.)