Hi,
I am studying BSc Biological Science in London. I already have a BSc and MSc in computing and worked as a software developer for 20+ years.
I am looking to get training, or a pathway, to learn more about Bioinformatics / Computational Biology. I am looking for online resources, training, courses, as I still have 2 years of my BSc to do and I want to learn more about Bioinformatics in parallel with my main degree.
Would be grateful for pointers to resources / options.
Best regards
Khalid
London
(Stay Safe)
1 answer
I am looking to get training, or a pathway, to learn more about Bioinformatics / Computational Biology.
Not to be pedantic here, but Bioinformatics and Computational Biology are not synonyms. Without going into the weeds, let's just say that the former deals with the application of math, statistics and machine learning to solving biological problems, while the latter is more oriented towards developing those tools. I am assuming that your interest is in Bioinformatics.
There are many free courses, some of which are listed here. I suggest you check them out right away as some of them literally started yesterday.
For me, bioinformatics and computational biology are more or less synonymous with bioinformatics maybe more specialized towards dealing with sequences but I've also heard/read elsewhere bioinformatics being more about tools development and computational biology more about data analysis/knowledge extraction (e.g. here).
There is no doubt in my mind that the two terms are different, but there are various arguments as to why they are different. For example, Mark Gerstein defines bioinformatics in terms of information content in biological molecules. To offer my understanding of his argument, studying evolution of proteins is bioinformatics, but studying ecological distribution of species isn't. And that's with the understanding that both types of studies are about various aspects of biology and may use similar statistical tools. Anyway, I think it would be off topic to get into deep dive regarding the differences between the two.
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If you have 20+ yrs of software development experience then you may be more valuable for institutions/companies to bring some development rigor to their existing software pipelines. Not sure what your language of choice/expertise is but you could start using a site like Rosalind to get your feet wet with bioinfomatics now.
Thank you so much for this reply - I will have a look at Rosalind. My languages are Java/Perl/C/C++/Python and now Kotlin
What I increasingly see as relevant is experience with the technological ecosystem surrounding software e.g. version control, data management systems, CI/CD, HPC and cloud deployment...