Forum:how to start Bioinformatics?

Question

[sajibsuvo70]

Hey all, I am from Bangladesh. Currently I am doing my Undergrad in microbiology. I am currently wanting to learn bioinformatics, but I cannot find any guideline or resources to start learning bioinformatics. I have fundamental knowledge on Molecular Biology and Molecular Genetics. Please any can help me with providing me with a proper guideline and resources by which I can start my Bioinformatics journey?

Thanks to all.

Answer 1

[Mensur Dlakic]

but I cannot find any guideline or resources to start learning bioinformatics.

I find this hard to believe. Googling How to learn bioinformatics will give you many resource to get going.

There are many ways to start. While learning Linux is a must for any kind of large-scale bioinformatics, it is not absolutely necessary for all bioinformatics tasks. You may want to start with some kind of class to help with that, or try one of lecture-type online Linux tutorials:

• http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~wjk/UnixIntro/
• http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/
• http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/

I think it is easiest to go with your actual research interest and learn how bioinformatics can help, because that will give you double motivation. Not only would you be learning the new field that is of interest, but it could potentially help your current research. Back in the day I was studying unusual proteins belonging to the AP-1 protein family that were different from most other members. Did a bunch of experiments and couldn't figure out why the difference. Eventually, I learned how to predict their structure, and that expanded the original hypothesis and put us on the right track. These days we don't do anything in the lab without having some kind of strong bioinformatics prediction as our starting hypothesis.

Keep in mind that starting in any field without a proper motivation, or without a tie to something practical, can be a rather abstract challenge. I may tell you to start in Bioinformatics by learning to build phylogenetic trees, and someone else might tell you to start by learning to predict genes from sequence. And both of us would be right, except that neither of those task would be useful in your work. It may be easier to tie your start in Bioinformatics to a practical problem you face in your own research, and then expand your Bioinformatics interest to other areas.

Answer 2

[GenoMax]

While there are multiple resources to learn bioinformatics there are probably none that are going to start with basics and then branch out into more complex topics because of breadth of topics.

There is an online book series that complements Biostars (https://www.biostarhandbook.com/ ) that you could start with.

If you want to stay with "free of cost resources" then there are many YouTube channels that can be useful. These will allow you to learn visually and at your own pace. I will list a few below

Dr. Simon Cockell "lockdown bioinformatics" - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lockdown+bioinformatics
Shomu's biology : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-uk-_TOgR0
Dr. Shirley Liu : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbPEDlpfW75n3GEnjDtEh1FI1oku7z_ME
MIT's Foundations of Computational Biology course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63uK-oWiLgO7LLJV6ZCWXac