I am a beginner Silverlight 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. What would you suggest?
First ideas: simple statistical analysis of input data, image collections (for example, find HD DNA image and put it in Silverlight Deep Zoom), lab inventory program..
Have a look at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/bio/default.aspx the Microsoft Biology Foundation, part of Microsoft Research. Its code is OpenSource (sic) and you will find many applications there. The apps cover most of the basics, sequences, etc. and have some nice display tools.
Collection/Maintenance/Retrieval of data is very important for any organization. Try this tutorial:
Silverlight tutorial: Creating a data centric web app with DataGrid, LINQ, and WCF Web Service
You placed a "bioinformatics" tag on your question. Many bioinformatics companies consider Perl programming to be quite important.
I suggest that you perform a search on "bioinformatics Perl" and take a look at books and sites that are retrieved. Perhaps you could park yourself at a local bookstore and peruse some of those titles. Free Perl interpreters are available.
You do have a basic understanding of genetics, yes? Be very familiar with some of the terminology, so you won't have to stare off into space while you pick from genotype/phenotype or mRNA/RNA/DNA or recall what a codon is.
It wouldn't hurt to nose around PubMed and get a basic understanding of what genomes are out there and what statistical tests can be performed on them.
I like your statistics idea. Perhaps you could write a program that tells you whether to accept or reject a null hypothesis based on numbers you read in from a file. Or perhaps you could figure out how to use the statistics portion of Entrez Gene in PubMed.
Best wishes for the interview.
