Jai Singh
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Question: Question: What a bioinformatician should must know ?
- You should have a fairly deep background in some aspect of molecular biology. It can be biochemistry, molecular biology, molecular biophysics, or even molecular modeling, but without a core of knowledge of molecular biology you will, as one person told us, "run into brick walls too often."
- You must absolutely understand the central dogma of molecular biology. Understanding how and why DNA sequence is transcribed into RNA and translated into protein is vital.
- You should have substantial experience with at least one or two major molecular biology software packages, either for sequence analysis or molecular modeling. The experience of learning one of these packages makes it much easier to learn to use other software quickly.
- You should be comfortable working in a command-line computing environment. Working in Linux or Unix will provide this experience.
- You should have experience with programming in a computer language such as C/C++, as well as in a scripting language such as Perl or Python.
Install Linux and learn command lines, make, bash. Start exploring the biological databases using ftp.
Knowing a little of everything is often better than having one expert skill. Learn as much as you can. Learn new bioinformatics tools, techniques, complex biological rules, programming logics .. etc.
Neelam,
I have different view on this topic. Bioinformatician should first decide their area of interest and then start learning it's related stuff. For example, drug designer should learn docking not NGS techiques. :)
— Jai Singh 3939 days ago
Hmm this question/answer will help me to decide and learn bioinformatics stuf in future. However, currently I started learning basics of Linux OS, and wish to install all the required software soon. Thanks to all.
