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Bioinformatics research work

Howday,

Sorry for the newbie question as I am new in this field and I want to discover more.

In my lab, we extracted raw data from NGS illumina sequrncer for Leukemia patients. My simple question is that, what are the possible research paths (research questions) can bioinformatics work on from this point. Are there research threads other than detecting SNPs?

Again very sorry for my lack-of-info. Also if you can suggest a good (and practical) bioinformatics book for a computer scientist, I would really appreciate it.

Many thanks

genome snp assembly

When you say "raw data from NGS illumina sequencer for Leukemia patients." this could mean quite a few different things. DNA? RNA? For what purpose? Was there an experiment plan in place? If so, what was it? Was the DNA isolated in some way? i.e. just DNA or ChIP Seq? Or other type of Seq? Same question for RNA.

Thank you Seidel. All I know for now that it is a DNA. If it is just DNA (non extracted), what are the other research analysis can be done?

Yes. Other than detecting SNPs, your raw data could be considered for many other research analysis depending on what type of data you have (DNA?RNA?) etc. certain raw data for example can be used for differential expression analysis, functional enrichment,etc. This is just one example i have mentioned. Define your purpose of research first too!! :)

Thanks raavi. If we say it is DNA, what other research analysis can be done, and more important what the goal? I see the door is open for muti-goals but I need to quantify which one is doable.

Many thanks

3 answers

You are basically saying that you have a refrigerator with some food in it, but you don't know what exactly is there. So you are asking us what kind of food to make. To which I say: make tiramisu. And someone else will say: make an omelet. Or scones. We don't know what your goal is or your ability, and you won't know either whether any of our suggestions will be doable no matter how good they sound. This is simply not a way to do it. I suggest you find someone near you to provide guidance.

Just my two cents, but actually technology and experiments should be chosen to answer a specific question you have according to your research topic, not vice versa. What is your scientific question? "A DNA" is not really helpful, this is like telling a computer scientist that one has "a computer" and asking what one could do with it, but not saying whether this is a laptop, PC, or server farm and without specifying what the question is ;-)

Let me say that what your lab is doing sounds quite unethical, at least in case you got new data from patients. It is not clear where that data comes from and if you are in fact using published or public data, please excuse the following rebuke: You are dealing with human data from people who are severely ill. Did you get an informed consent from the patient? Then you can do with the data whatever the patients have consented to, but now you are telling us your lab has stock-piled data from those sick people without an actual plan of what to do with them? I really hope this is not the case. But then, if your lab has a plan, why don't you simply ask your lab manager what that plan was?

While OP does not explicitly specify (or behave like they have) consented data, I don't think it is fair to assume their lab is doing something unethical. It looks more like a language barrier than an unethical fishing expedition to me.

I am not sure what they are doing, but that is why I wrote it "sounds unethical". Even if the data is consented, dealing with patient data requires a certain level of professionalism. That would include guidance on what to do and how to analyze the data.

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