In fact, there are huge demands for expert biological data analyst. It’s a fairly new  (not exactly) hot area, these bioinformatician are invaluable because they know and understand the significance of biological data for your research and how you can use it for better understanding of biological problems.

The bioinformatics can discover biological patterns and stories in genomic and proteomics data. They can develop the pipeline needed to properly collect, store and analyse it.

Once your research group is ready to make a larger investment and hire a bioinformatician to gain a competitive edge, there are several key traits to seek out in potential candidates. The best bioinformatician are:

1. Highly Skilled - programming skills, experience with the biological software and tools.

The biological data won’t illuminate much if the scientist analysing it doesn’t possess practical programming skills, experience with the biological software and tools and a thorough understanding of basic biological stuff. A solid background in mathematics and statistics is also an indispensable trait.

2. Insight - Real vision, robust understanding and deep insight.

In order to hire the best bioinformatics and computational biologist scientist for your needs, it is always recommended and mostly practiced by the recruiters, to ask each contender to write and develop a sample script/presentation based on a specific set of data you provide. Then, explore the approaches used to deal with data provided and pick up those candidates who convey real vision, robust understanding and deep insight.

3. Energetic – Curiosity to explore

Mostly natural curiosity and enthusiasm for solving big biological problems coupled with an ability to transform data into a scientific stories may place one candidate above the rest. In addition to achieve that, the bioinformatician should be agile enough to quickly modify their methods to suit changes within a particular research.

4. Researcher – Publications

Look for someone who has a keen sense and understanding of concern biological problems. You can judge it by looking at previously published papers and data. It is always recommended to have a look at GitHub and other repository for codes written by her/him.

5. Impressive communicator - Insight that can’t be expressed is worthless.

Good bioinformatics scientists are able to uncover biological patterns and are willing to explain those patterns in clear and helpful ways through thoughtful and open communication. In other words, they should must have good scientific writing skills. A computational biologis/bioinformatician  should know how to present the data and tell a scientific story through numbers/images.

More at http://busco.ezlab.org/

Address of the bookmark: http://busco.ezlab.org/

It supports most commonly used file formats including SAM/BAM, Wiggle/BigWig, BED, GFF/GTF, VCF.

CrossMap is designed to liftover genome coordinates between assemblies. It’s not a program for aligning sequences to reference genome.

We do not recommend using CrossMap to convert genome coordinates between species.

More at http://crossmap.sourceforge.net/

Address of the bookmark: http://crossmap.sourceforge.net/

Basic Galaxy Tutorial

• RNA-Seq tutorial based on Trapnell et al. (2012) Nature Protocols

In this tutorial we cover the concepts of RNA-Seq differential gene expression (DGE) analysis using a very small synthetic dataset from a well studied organism.

Advanced Galaxy Tutorial

• RNA-Seq (Advanced) Tutorial

In this tutorial we compare the performance of three statistically-based differential expression tools:

* CuffDiff

* EdgeR

* DESeq2

Advanced Command Line Tutorial

• Graphical Output with CummeRbund introduces some basic commands using the cummeRbund package of the R programming language

You will need to install R, RStudio and cummeRbund on your PC (explained in the Tutorial). You will learn how to produce graphical output from RNA-Seq analysis previously done using a Cuffdiff analysis.

Variant Detection

Basic Galaxy Tutorial

• Variant Detection tutorial

In this tutorial we cover the concepts of detecting small variants (SNVs and indels) in human genomic DNA using a small set of reads from chromosome 22.

Advanced Galaxy Tutorial

• Variant Detection (Advanced) Tutorial

In this tutorial we compare the performance of three statistically-based variant detection tools:

* SAMtools: Mpileup

* GATK: Unified Genotyper

* FreeBayes

Each of these tools takes as its input a BAM file of aligned reads and generates a list of likely variants in VCF format

Pipelines are for those who are comfortable with using the UNIX command line; and often allow more control over branching and iteration logic.

• WGS/exome GATK-based variant calling pipeline

This is a basic variant-calling and annotation pipeline developed at the Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative (VLSCI), University of Melbourne. It is based around BWA, GATK and ENSEMBL and was originally designed for human (or similar) data. The master branch is configured for WGS data; there is an exome branch configured for variant calling in exome data.

To run the pipeline you will need Rubra: https://github.com/bjpop/rubra. Rubra uses the python Ruffus library: http://www.ruffus.org.uk/.

Protocols

• Familial Variant Calling

In this protocol we discuss and outline the process of calling familial related mutations.

• Somatic Variant Calling

In this protocol we discuss and outline the process of identifying somatic variants or mutations.

Assembly

Basic Galaxy Tutorial

• Genome assembly tutorial

In this tutorial we carry out de novo assembly of a microbial genome. We have also written a De novo Genome Assembly for Illumina Data Protocol for a more generic description of the method.

Protocol

• De novo Genome Assembly for Illumina Data

In this protocol we discuss and outline the process of de novo assembly for small to medium sized genomes. Use our Genome assembly tutorial to learn a specific case of using Galaxy to carry out de novo assembly of a microbial genome.

Small RNAs

Basic Galaxy Tutorial

• Quality control for small RNA

This tutorial covers initial steps of the workflow for analysis of short RNA expression such as a quality control of the raw reads, processing of the raw reads for the subsequent analysis and initial quality assessment of the library.

ChIP Seq

Protocol

• ChIP-Seq

In this protocol we discuss ChIP-Seq: a method to analyze the interaction between proteins and DNA.

Amplicons

Protocol

• Amplicon Alignment

In this protocol we discuss and outline the process of aligning custom amplicons using primers for high precision.

Learn Galaxy

Introduction to Galaxy, for those who are very new to Galaxy.

Using Histories and Workflows, for those with some Galaxy knowledge.

The Galaxy project website has many tutorials and screencasts about using Galaxy and the tools, and developing new tools.

Address of the bookmark: https://genome.edu.au/wiki/Learn

De Bruijn Graphs for NGS Assembly
Algorithms for PacBio Reads
Software and Hardware Concepts for Bioinformatics
Finding us in Homolog.us (Search Algorithms)
NGS Genome and RNAseq Assembly - a Hands on Primer
Introduction to PERL, Python, R and C/C++ for Bioinformatics

Address of the bookmark: http://www.homolog.us/Tutorials/

Pondicherry University Puducherry has been identified as a nodal agency by the Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India to coordinate this examination along with nine centres namely, Pune University, Pune; Anna University, Chennai; Calcatta University (WBUT) Kolkata; Institute of Bioinformatics & Applied Biotechnology, Bangalore; North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad; University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram; Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Assam Agricultural University, Guwahati.

In the BINC 2013 examination,17 candidates were certified. DBT has agreed to fund Research fellowships for all the BINC qualified Indian nationals to pursue Ph.D. in Indian Institutes/Universities. Note that the candidate must possess a postgraduate degree(or equivalent) & meet the criteria of the institutes/universities in order to avail research fellowship. In addition, cash prize of Rs. 10,000/- will be awarded to the top 10 BINC qualifiers.

More at http://210.212.230.224:9999/BINC/

Installation

To download the development version of pacman:

Download the zip ball or tar ball, decompress and run R CMD INSTALL on it, or use the devtools package to install the development version:

## Make sure your current packages are up to date
update.packages()
## devtools is required
devtools::install_github("trinker/pacman")

Note: Windows users need Rtools and devtools to install this way.

More at https://github.com/trinker/pacman