Forum:Learning community for newbies

Question

[denzwei]

Hi there,

I am new to this website and I've found it very useful as a person who just started exploring Bioinformatics field. I already have a degree in Medicine and interesting in shifting to Bioinformatics now (not sure about the particular subfield yet). I have already started a Introduction to CS and Programming in Python course from MIT as well as Intro to Biology MIT course taught by Eric Lander to refresh my knowledge of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Genetics and planning to take more advanced biology-related courses later on. I am pretty familiar with things that need to be learned at first so I would be very glad to find people who also are just starting their journey to Bioinformatics and, probably, organize some learning community. Ideally if there would be people with different background: either biological or from CS.

Anyway, will be thankful to hear your thoughts as well as some advice about the ideal learning path from experts in the field.

Regards

[denzwei]

I am also interested whether Biostar Handbook together with online course Learn Bioinformatics in 100 hours would be a useful resources to start diving into Bioinformatics. Could someone give me an advice please?

Thanks in advance!

[GenoMax]

Sure. That would be one way to get started.

Answer 1

[GenoMax]

I already have a degree in Medicine and interesting in shifting to Bioinformatics now

Please don't! At least don't plan to stop practicing medicine.

Acquire informatics knowledge to arm yourself with necessary information but please use your medical training to help people directly. You would be doing service to society that is much more critical by helping patients understand and apply informatics observations that may affect their own and their families' health.

[theobroma22]

I’ve been in this field for more than 5 years and have learned a lot but always feel like I’m just starting the journey - maybe because I’ll always be a student. In my humble opinion Biostars IS the ideal place because peoples’ experiences are so broad - this way, I not only learn, but also teach!

[denzwei]

Thank you for your answers! Yes, I agree that it is very important to help people to take care of their health, I am just interesting to be more involved in research and technologies. So what would be your advices? What are the most critical skills and knowledge should I have to get started working on different bioinformatics problems and getting the first job, probably the remote one at the first time?

[GenoMax]

As a physician you don't have to do bioinformatics analysis/actual work. Once you learn how stuff is done and you are able to understand the analysis that would be a good achievement. You can then synthesize the findings in a way that you would be able to talk with a patient and/or suggest/devise a therapeutic solution (not always possible) for them. Remember that bioinformaticians may know what the issue is but they are not qualified/allowed to offer any advice to a patient. Only you can do that as a physician (I assume you are one?, if not some of my comments may not apply).

Answer 2

[Damian Kao]

The best way to start learning bioinformatics is to download some datasets and dive right in to it. There are a lot of "janitorial" skills (data cleaning, data-mining, data manipulations) in bioinformatics that comes with experience. The earlier you start dealing with downloading data from NCBI, installing/running software, converting formats, the better off you'll be later when you get into the more abstract concepts.

Answer 3

[Istvan Albert]

There is an interesting dimension to this all.

Medicine is the oldest of sciences - going back to the beginning of civilizations. Bioinformatics is the newest of sciences - the science of how information is stored and processed within a living entity. The former builds on accumulated information over millennia, the other is an ad-hoc ten-year-old science. There is a massive culture shock to it.

As for an advice, in a nutshell, you need to recognize that there is a huge difference between understanding what an analysis consists and how to interpret the results versus doing that analysis yourself as a primary job.

Unless you are already knowledgeable of computing (Unix, programming, shell) it will take some time to build up the skills necessary to run your own analyses. Learning bioinformatics has commonalities to learning to play an instrument - even after you know what needs to be done you need the practice to get the right "notes" out.