Beautiful Code

Chapter 12. Growing Beautiful Code in BioPerl

Lincoln Stein

In the past decade, biology has blossomed into an information science. New technologies provide biologists with unprecedented windows into the intricate processes going on inside the cells of animals and plants. DNA sequencing machines allow the rapid readout of complete genome sequences; microarray technologies give snapshots of the complex patterns of gene expression in developing organisms; confocal microscopes produce 3-D movies to track changes in cell architecture as precancerous tissues turn malignant.

These new technologies routinely generate terabytes of data, all of which must be filtered, stored, manipulated and data-mined. The application of computer science and software engineering to the problems of biological data management is called bioinformatics.

Bioinformatics is similar in many ways to software engineering on Wall Street. Like software engineers in the financial sector, bioinformaticians need to be fleet of foot: they have to get applications up and running quickly with little time for requirement analysis and design. Data sets are large and mutable, with shelf lives measured in months, not years. For this reason, most bioinformatics developers favor agile development techniques, such as eXtreme Programming, and toolkits that allow for rapid prototyping and deployment. As in the financial sector, there is also a strong emphasis on data visualization and pattern recognition.

BioPerl and the Bio::Graphics ...