Technologies used in EMBL

Question

My fried suggest I try to apply for a job at EMBL. I'm not bioinformatic in any way, but my friend (who by the way is a biologist working at EMBL) insists that I could adapt to the new environment as long as I have a interest in subject and am generally good at learning new things.

But here is a catch. For the last 4 years I've been working with .Net and other Microsoft technologies which I enjoy even more lately. Now, from googling I couldn't find whether it will be possible for me to stick with .Net because it was all perl, java, linux and so on. Is there anybody who could prove whether there is at least minor opportunity for a .Net developer to at least partly develop with C#?

Answer 1

It's true that there's very little development done in C# and .Net in the bioinformatics arena. The field has a long tradition of open source development. Although you could in theory develop in C# on the Mono platform, I don't know of any large projects that use it. Your C# experience will help a lot in catching on to Java, which is used for the large architecture type projects. Also, web development experience would translate well.

I agree with your friend though that this should not dissuade you. The question you should ask yourself is do you have a natural curiosity, and a willingness to learn. If that's the case, you can expect to encounter concepts like

• Biology, the genetic code, experimental design etc
• Open source platforms like Linux
• Dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby
• High performance computing
• Machine learning, and working with noisy data
• The challenges that come with managing huge datasets

I may be wrong, but I've always reassured myself that these lessons would make up for any experience lost in more commercial platforms like Windows and C#, should I ever want to switch back.

It's a rewarding field (though no so much financially) and I would definitely recommend giving it a chance.

Answer 2

You can get better answers at biostar.stackexchange

From my experience, there is not much of .net and microsoft technologies in bioinformatics. We like open source programs and we use scripting programming languages put together with makefiles. In any case, it is possible that you may find a group working with .net.

To have an idea on which skills are needed for a bioinformatician, have a look at Software Carpentry, a tutorial designed for biologists wishing to learn programming.