How hard is it for a computer science MS student (with a little knowledge in biology) to research problems related to bioinformatics? How much is bioinformatics related to graph algorithms and data structures?
+1
A:
There's plenty of computer scientists who start a career in bioinformatics knowing little biology. We run a Masters program in bioinformatics, and probably half our intake are computer science graduates.
Taking a computational approach to tackling biological problems is going to require you to have some appreciation of the underlying biology though. If you don't understand the science underpinning the graph, then the greatest algorithm in the world isn't going to help you interpret it any better.
The comp sci graduates on our course spend the majority of their first semester being taught biology.
sjcockell
2010-07-29 07:44:14
By the way, there's a captive audience of bioinformaticians at http://biostar.stackexchange.com/ whom you could ask this question of.
sjcockell
2010-07-29 07:45:36
A:
Bioinformatics is such a broad field, that students with a strong CS background can make meaningful contributions almost anywhere they have an interest. I've mentored a number of undergraduates over the past couple of years from both the bio side and CS side, and overall the CS students have been much more successful.
Having a good algorithmic background is important, but I would say a good background in statistics can often be equally valuable, especially on the genomics side of things.
If you want to get a feel for what bioinformatics research looks like, I would recommend you browse some articles on PLoS Computational Biology and BMC Bioinformatics. See what people are working on and if you have an interest. I mention these journals because they are more computationally oriented, are open-access (free to read without subscription), and relatively high impact.
awesomo
2010-07-30 04:51:06
+2
A:
Generally you will have a "domain expert" to help with the hard biology part. The computer science part requires a strong algorithmic background and at least a knowledge of the basics in the particular field of biology.
With a strong compsci background you can pick up the biology portion on the job.
Brian Makin
2010-07-30 23:17:35
+2
A:
There are really two camps in the bioinformatics field. The first of which is the compSci group, whose background is that of traditional computer science . These folks are mostly interested in the development of the algorithmic aspects to biological computing. This includes topics essential to researchers such as 3d sequence prediction and alignment, most notably the BLAST and BLAT algorithm. It follows that the second camp is from the biology side of the coin, where individuals implement the powerful algorithms developed from the first camp using an intimate knowledge of how wet-lab research techniques can ultimately verify the information garnished through computational tools
Might I suggest you take courses including, Biochemistry, Genetics, Molecular Genetics, Microbiology & Biophysics, and Organic Chemistry. This is a lot of work, but no more challenging than the CS course work you have done, and many of the successful bioinformatics folks have learned CS first.
Some problems which might be of interest to you are, pattern discovery and recognition, alignment of next generation sequence data using clustal computing, generation of sequence logos, and mapping of gene interactions which includes the visualization of microarray data.
wespiserA
2010-08-13 07:20:27