Forum:Bioinfomatic course or training for Computer Science professional

Question

[kianc]

Hello,

I'm a computer science post graduate wanted to learn and take up Bioinformatic course/training. I want to learn and develop my knowledge in Bioinformatics domain. Can somebody suggest where and how to start to become a Bioinformatician.

I have a basic knowledge about Biology from my schooling so not sure whether I would meet the requirements.

Please advise any online training or onsite training in the UK.

Thanks in advance and much appreciated.

Regards

[ATpoint]

I have a basic knowledge about Biology from my schooling so not sure whether I would meet the requirements.

In short: No!

[GenoMax]

Past relevant threads: What training do you think a computer scientist should do to move into the bioinformatics field?
Bioinformatics courses, workshops or training

[amritp49]

please mail us @ [e-mail]

Answer 1

[Carlo Yague]

I don't fully agree with ATPoint's comment. Bioinformatics course/training should be accessible to anyone from either biological or programming background.

That being said, I would recommend the online bioinformatics course at coursera. They do a good job in replacing the bioinformatics problems into their biological context.

[ATpoint]

With my admittedly uncouth comment, I intended to say that joining any bioinformatics course (in my opinion) or working in bioinformatics requires a solid understanding of the biology that you are analyzing, especially because the basics, such as command line, scripting and data formats, should be rather straight-forward cor a computer scientist.

[Istvan Albert]

In my personal observations, most biology specific knowledge is descriptive and superficial. In addition, the concepts are very independent of one another. Understanding the role of root system of a tree has no bearing on understanding heart disease or the linnaean taxonomy. Yet all these are part of Biology.

This is unlike many other sciences where the concepts build very strongly on one another

This is not to say that one would not need biology to practice bioinformatics. Instead what I am saying is that the particular details of the biology that one needs to know has to be learned in parallel.

Most biologists would not have that preparation either.

[Jean-Karim Heriche]

In many contexts, especially when working as part of a team, the issue is one of communication. The bioinformaticians/computational biologists are expected to translate the biological data and question into a relevant computational solution. Basic understanding of the biology at hand and of the data-generating process is almost always required at least to the level of being able to ask for clarifications. In many projects, some knowledge of biology is assumed and never spoken of. I've seen a project run into trouble because the computer scientist involved didn't know that genes could have multiple transcripts and didn't notice because the biologists were always talking about "the genes".

[kianc]

Thanks all, I will look at the bioinformatics online courses on Coursera.

Istvan thanks again for sharing the information.

As concerns raised by Jean-Karim from experience I'm happy to put efforts and learn Basic knowledge of biology. Please advise.