(A) Regulatory System Analysis with respect to microRNAs

(B) Computational Epigenomics & Regulomics:

(C) Computational issues with Next Generation Sequencing:

Department of Biotechnology,
Institute of Himalyan Bioresources Technology
CSIR, Palampur(Himachal Pradesh), India.
Email: ravishihbt.res.in; ravish9gmail.com

More @ http://scbb.ihbt.res.in/SCBB_dept/Lab_Member.php

Lab page: http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/edwards/index.html

Lab page @ http://www.mathomics.cl/

Lab Page http://gabi.cidbio.org/index/

* Analysis of Gene Expression Pattern Images: high-performance image analysis and mining for different model organisms, such as fruitfly, C. elegans, and mouse;
* Feature/Model Learning: developing algorithms and software

Location :Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Virginia, USA.

http://research.janelia.org/peng/

However, the ancient invasions and migrations to slavery and trade, history is embroidered with events that led to interactions between previously separate populations. Early humans migrated due to many factors such as changing climate and landscape and inadequate food supply. Historical migration of human populations begins with the movement of Homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia about a million years ago. Homo sapiens appear to have occupied all of Africa about 150,000 years ago, moved out of Africa 70,000 years ago, and had spread across Australia, Asia and Europe by 40,000 years BC. Indo-Aryan migration from the Indus Valley to the plain of the River Ganges in Northern India is presumed to have taken place in the Middle to Late Bronze Age, contemporary to the Late Harappan phase in India (ca. 1700 to 1300 BC). From 180 BC, a series of invasions from Central Asia followed, including those led by the Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Indo-Parthians and Kushans in the northwestern Indian subcontinent.

Using the recent advance technologies researchers have created a historical atlas of instances of such mixing. They use a sophisticated statistical method for making inferences about human history and infer populations interbredings ( happen over the past 4,000 years) with an ease.

The study published the findings and presented with an interactive map. http://admixturemap.paintmychromosomes.com/

These sort of genomic study have some limilation. It is hard to precisely define sources of mixing when it occurred between genetically similar groups, and scenarios involving multiple waves of mixing over time or between multiple groups can be difficult to tease apart. But it is believed that larger sample sizes will improve resolution. These high resolution will provide a deeper understanding of human history.

Reference:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2014/01/28/science.1245938

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21390129?dopt=Abstract&holding=npg

http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/paper-ethnicity.html

Image: Wikipedia

1. Update new things continuously
As per my personal experience, it’s not always easy to work as a bioinformatician!  There are couple of reasons to say that; First computational part of biology make our life’s a little harder compared to other professional categories. The fact - for instance - that the technology cycle in the bioinformatics world is very short, the actual knowledge becomes outdated in a few months or years. Therefore, we need to learn continuously - new things get important. Second, to stay on top of things we really need the strong will to be good at our job. That's probably the most important characteristic to bioinformatician. They are usually an excellent knowledge worker with great technical abilities, and have the will to be that over decades!

2. Avoid the sentence "I did not know what to do!"
In our computational biology lab, we generally face lots of technical problems. But as you know, it's impossible to know everything to do the computational biology jobs ( Yup.. because you need diverse and multidisciplinary knowledge to understand biological problems and resolve their respective solutions), therefore it's absolutely necessary that a bioinformatician finds its way through a new topic. How I typically do that is I use google and I talk to other experts in our laboratory or online biostar community to find out what they think. "I did not know what to do!" should not be an argument for us.

3. To make oneself useful
Several time it does happen, you finished our task earlier than expected; in such cases if you have some time left then: Take a coffee and play chess; reversi, etc. In my case I take a rest. Afterwards I think about what I could do that helps the team to achieve its targets, 'cause some of my team mates probably didn't finish! (at least if I didn't met them at coffee bar !!)

4. Care for all
During my rigorous research duration; I attended several workshop organized by my University departments. I had a discussion with other research fellow, professors; I generally ask … what it really takes to make a team successful or to be a successful research leader. They always said: "Well, you need some caring people!" I think there is a lot truth in that statement. If we do not care about quality, timelines, good team culture, respectful communication (!!), clean code, if all this doesn’t matter to us, then I believe the probability is higher that we fail in research and analysis.

5. Be good with people
Because bioinformatician and computational biologist jobs typically involves to work in a (most wanted J cross-departmental!) team, therefore it's important that we're (more or less) good in dealing with other individuals. Everyone have their own strengths and weaknesses, just like us. It's important to treat all the research team mates with respect, regardless of their technical competence or contributions. Of course, sometimes people deserve a clear statement (!!!), but try to do these things one-on-one. Make sure nobody loses his face. Attend the meetings at the coffee bar; be good at table top soccer and go out once in a while to have a beer with your team. You know what I'm talking about.

At the end of a week I look back and I ask myself what I have produced. This could be paperwork, community days or (best!!) programming code. Always remember there is always a solution to a problem. Most of the times there are at least three solutions. So, don’t just blame, suggest a solution.

That's it. I am looking forward to your thoughts and comments!

The First time when you login to the remotehost from a localhost, it will display the host key not found message and you can give “yes” to continue. The host key of the remote host will be added under .ssh2/hostkeys directory of your home directory, as shown below.

localhost$ ssh -l jit remotehost.example.com

jit@remotehost.example.com password:

remotehost.example.com$

The Second time when you login to the remote host from the localhost, it will prompt only for the password as the remote host key is already added to the known hosts list of the ssh client.

localhost$ ssh -l jit remotehost.example.com
jit@remotehost.example.com password:
remotehost.example.com$

For some reason, if the host key of the remote host is changed after you logged in for the first time, you may get a warning message as shown below. This could be because of various reasons such as 1) Sysadmin upgraded/reinstalled the SSH server on the remote host 2) someone is doing malicious activity etc., The best possible action to take before saying “yes” to the message below, is to call your sysadmin and identify why you got the host key changed message and verify whether it is the correct host key or not.

localhost$ ssh -l jit remotehost.example.com

jit @remotehost.example.com's password:
remotehost$

4. Debug SSH Client:

Sometimes it is necessary to view debug messages to troubleshoot any SSH connection issues. For this purpose, pass -v (lowercase v) option to the ssh as shown below.

Example without debug message:

        localhost$ ssh -l jit remotehost.example.com
        warning: Connecting to remotehost.example.com failed: No address associated to the name
        localhost$

Example with debug message:

        locaclhost$ ssh -v -l jit remotehost.example.com
        debug: SshConfig/sshconfig.c:2838/ssh2_parse_config_ext: Metaconfig parsing stopped at line 3.
        debug: SshConfig/sshconfig.c:637/ssh_config_set_param_verbose: Setting variable 'VerboseMode' to 'FALSE'.
        debug: SshConfig/sshconfig.c:3130/ssh_config_read_file_ext: Read 17 params from config file.
        debug: Ssh2/ssh2.c:1707/main: User config file not found, using defaults. (Looked for '/home/jit/.ssh2/ssh2_config')
        debug: Connecting to remotehost.example.com, port 22... (SOCKS not used)
        warning: Connecting to remotehost.example.com failed: No address associated to

5. Escape Character: (Toggle SSH session, SSH session statistics etc.)

Escape character ~ get’s SSH clients attention and the character following the ~ determines the escape command.
Toggle SSH Session: When you’ve logged on to the remotehost using ssh from the localhost, you may want to come back to the localhost to perform some activity and go back to remote host again. In this case, you don’t need to disconnect the ssh session to the remote host. Instead follow the steps below.

i. Login to remotehost from localhost: localhost$ssh -l jit remotehost
ii. Now you are connected to the remotehost: remotehost$
iii. To come back to the localhost temporarily, type the escape character ~ and Control-Z. When you type ~ you will not see that immediately on the screen until you press and press enter. So, on the remotehost in a new line enter the following key strokes for the below to work: ~

    remotehost$ ~^Z
    [1]+  Stopped                 ssh -l jit remotehost
    localhost$

iv. Now you are back to the localhost and the ssh remotehost client session runs as a typical unix background job, which you can check as shown below:

    localhost$ jobs
    [1]+  Stopped                 ssh -l jit remotehost

v. You can go back to the remote host ssh without entering the password again by bringing the background ssh remotehost session job to foreground on the localhost

    localhost$ fg %1
    ssh -l jit remotehost
    remotehost$

'du' – Check the size of a directory

$ du
This command ( du) gives you a list of directories that exist in the current working directory along with their sizes in kilobytes (default). The last line of the output gives you the total size of the current directory including its subdirectories.

$ du /home/jin1
The above command would give you the directory size of the directory /home/david

$ du -h
The same “du”command with some flag gives you a better output than the default one. The option '-h' stands for human readable format. Therefore, in order to print the sizes of the files / directories in your desire notation use this time suffixed with a 'k' if its kilobytes and 'M' if its Megabytes and 'G' if its Gigabytes.

$ du -ah
If you are interested in checking everything present in a folder use above mentioned command. It gives us not only the directories but also all the files that are present in the current directory. The “-a” flag displays the filenames along with the directory names in the output.

$ du -c
This gives you a grand total as the last line of the output. So if your directory occupies 30MB the last 2 lines of the output would be 30M.

$ du -s
Use this command to displays a summary of the directory size. It is the simplest way to know the total size of the current directory.

$ du -S
This would display the size of the current directory excluding the size of the subdirectories that exist within that directory. So it basically shows you the total size of all the files that exist in the current directory.

$ du --exculde=mp3
Several times it required to exclude some directory in our size calculation. In such cases the above command would display the size of the current directory along with all its subdirectories, but it would exclude all the files having the given pattern present in their filenames.

'df' - finding the disk free space / disk usage

$ df
Hmmm … now “df” command is really useful, and I guess you are going to use it over time. Typing the above command, outputs a table consisting of 6 columns. All the columns are very easy to understand. Remember that the 'Size', 'Used' and 'Avail' columns use kilobytes as the unit. The 'Use%' column shows the usage as a percentage which is also very useful.

$ df -h
Displays the same output as the previous command but the '-h' indicates human readable format. Hence instead of kilobytes as the unit the output would have 'M' for Megabytes and 'G' for Gigabytes.

Example: Linux installed on /dev/hda1
$ df -h | grep /dev/hda1

All right, this is not the only option to check the sizes and free spaces but there are a few more options that can be used with 'du' and 'df' . I will discuss it later.

Candidate Requirements:
A PhD in computer science, computational biology, Bioinformatics, or a related field, along with sufficient programming skills for prototyping. Experience with next generation sequencing data analysis is required. Candidates with MS degree but with relevant work experience can also be considered.

To Apply
To apply, please send your updated CV and cover letter to Dr. Rohit Gupta (rohit@strandls.com).

Source: http://www.strandls.com/application-scientist