Why teach a course in bioinformatics? What is bioinformatics? Answer It depends who you ask Various definitions • The science of using information to understand biology • The science that uses computa[.]
What is bioinformatics? Answer: It depends who you ask Various definitions: • The science of using information to understand biology • The science that uses computational approaches to answer biological questions • The science of understanding the structure and function of genes and proteins through advanced, computer-aided statistical analysis • The marriage of biology and computer science What skills should a bioinformatician have? • You should have fairly deep background in molecular biology • You must understand the central dogma of molecular biology • You should have experience with programming • You should be comfortable working in a command line computing environment Opinion- Skills critical to success: nd • The ability to frame biological questions in a manner understandable to computer scientists • A thorough understanding of the problems addressed in the bioinformatics field • Database administration and programming skills • Computer science and genomics expertise for analysis of small- and large scale informatics problems • The ability to filter information and extract possible relationships between data sets Put in simpler terms: • You need to know some molecular biology • You have to love computers • It helps to like math Important Point• Bioinformatics is a tool and not an end in itself Why teach a course in bioinformatics? Part of answer: Bioinformaticians are needed From Science ‘next wave’*: • Imagine a job fair with 50 high-tech companies competing to recruit one of the handful of properly qualified scientists who bothered to show up Sounds like a pie-inthe-sky dream, doesn't it? But according to Victor Markovitz, vice president of bioinformatics systems at Gene Logic Inc., this actually happened at a recent biotech fair And it is more or less typical of the prevailing global job market in bioinformatics and computational biology, where there are many more headhunters than heads • *10-29-00 From Nov 2000: • “There is a huge demand for people with the combination of a master’s degree in computer science and a Ph D in a life science.” Why now?? Easy Answer: * The astronomical growth of Genbank and The Protein Data Bank! Today large molecular biology projects are rarely hypothesis driven The projects are designed to generate data Bioinformatics provides the tools to obtain, store, and unravel the information Collaborative projects require centralized databases and systematic methods for sharing data • A good example is the C elegans genome project This project has a centralized website Information is: – Stored in a consistent format – Linked in an informative manner Transcription = RNA synthesis Translation = Protein synthesis Knowledge is built by constructing relations between different kinds of data • SMD (Stanford Microarray Database) stores raw and normalized data from microarray experiments The data for a given gene is linked to a mass of genetic information, including an expression history for that entity, a description of the associated protein, chromosomal location, etc Data is a resource that can be mined • Beyond the initial project, data is still a valuable resource Results from numerous research projects that might themselves be of minimal significance, can often be put together to make generalizations or observations that could be quite significant ... math Important Point• Bioinformatics is a tool and not an end in itself Why teach a course in bioinformatics? Part of answer: Bioinformaticians are needed From Science ‘next wave’*: • Imagine... data Bioinformatics provides the tools to obtain, store, and unravel the information Collaborative projects require centralized databases and systematic methods for sharing data • A good example... constructing relations between different kinds of data • SMD (Stanford Microarray Database) stores raw and normalized data from microarray experiments The data for a given gene is linked to a mass