[BiO BB] [Fwd: starting a career in bioinformatics]

[Indraneel Majumdar]

Hi,

Just let your C do something with biological data and you'll be neck deep
in Bioinformatics in no time. At the present condition Bioinformatics as a
black art and voodoo science is so nascent that it's difficult to learn it
from standard textbooks. Add to that the very general definition of
Bioinformatics and you have people from all sorts of streams jumping into
this hot pot. If you're looking to do some work yourself, just get hold of
any current problem and start working. You're lucky that you'll not be
wasting time hunting. And as you work through you'll definitely pick up
the good things like Perl, Python, C++ et al. and maybe even Java. This
field is changing so fast that you'll never be ready enough, so probably
the best is to learn on the job. Once you've done some work, companies and
Bioinfo labs will be more than eager to put you to more challenging
problems irrespective of what your formal qualifications (Degrees) are.
This at least is a field where you're judged by what you've done and can
do. And for a MSc in Life Sciences with programming skills nothing can be
more satisfying than working in Bioinformatics. As a starter get yourself
acquainted with these:

Websites of the NCBI and EBI and all links therein
If you can't locate the above: the page at google.com
words like Genbank, EMBL, Pubmed, Medline, SRS
Data formats of Genbank, EMBL, SWISSPROT, PDB and others
Preferably an Operating system like Linux or FreeBSD (No I'm not
advocating, most work gets done on these)
Open source software for sequence/structure analysis/visualisation or
statistical data analysis (words like BLAST, Fasta, VMD, NAMD, O etc)
Websites of bioperl.org, bioxml.org, biopython.org, biojava.org
Journals like Bioinformatics, PNAS, Technology Review, Computers (all this
not _absolutely_ necessary)
What some companies like IBM, Incyte Genomics, Structural Bioinformatics,
Celera, SGI are doing (DSQ and GVK in India too have some big plans)

By the time you're through maybe you'll have a project or two registered
here or at sourceforge.org

Best wishes,
Indraneel

On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, J.W. Bizzaro wrote:

> This seems to be a recurring question.  Jeff

> I have completed m.sc(biosciences)& know Cprogramming.what 
> other things should i learn,as to start a career in 
> bioinformatics.

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