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Joshua Ainsley and his colleagues' work at the Laboratory of Leon Reijmers, PhD, Tufts University Neuroscience Department focuses on changes in gene expression that occurs in neurons during learning and memory formation. To examine these events on a genome-wide scale, they use a technique called next generation sequencing which generates millions of "reads" of short nucleotide sequences. By sequencing the RNA that is present before and after a behavioral paradigm designed to induce learning in mice and then comparing the results, they can begin to understand some of the basic steps that occur in a live animal forming a memory. The cluster is essential for their research since figuring out where millions of short DNA sequences map on the mouse genome is a very computationally intensive process. Not only would the results take much longer to obtain on a single desktop, but they would be very limited in their ability to modify parameters of their analysis to see how that affects the results. What would take weeks or months takes hours or days thanks to the resources provided by the Tufts cluster.