Applications are invited for the STUDENTSHIP and TRAINEESHIP vacancies to carry out project/research work in the DBT - Bioinformatics Infrastructure Facility with consolidated stipend of Rs.5,000/- per month.

Essential Qualification

Student Trainee: Those who have completed M.Sc., Bioinformatics/Biophysics/Life sciences or Pursuing M.Tech., Bioinformatics/Biotechnology

Duration : 3-4 Months

Student Trainee: Those who are pursuing M.Sc Bioinformatics/Biophysics/ Life sciences/others

Duration : 2-3 Months

Mail your CV on or before 25th November 2013 to shirai2011@gmail.com and hard copy to "Dr. D. Velmurugan, Professor & Head, CAS in Crystallography and Biophysics, University of Madras, Guindy Campus, Chennai 600 025". Also, the applicants are requested to attend the interview on 29th November, 2013 at 11 A.M.

Advertisement:

www.unom.ac.in/uploads/announcements/bifadvertisement_20131114080003_23240.pdf

The most common newbie questions are:

Should I try to use these free open source programs?  Why are we not trying GUI software for computational analysis? Should I use commercial bioinformatics programs/software?”

1. Let’s be open

We generally think free and cheap are useless. But this concept is not applicable when we discuss open source software. Mostly, the bioinformatics software is developed by highly competitive biological programmers who believe in open sharing of knowledge. They come under Open Bioinformatics Foundation or O|B|F which is a non-profit, volunteer run organization focused on supporting open source programming in bioinformatics. The best part about open source tools/software is that they’re free to download the source code and read exactly what the program does. If you are so inclined, you can view all of the parts of the program and see the logical flow of the pipeline. In addition, open source makes an excellent learning tool for any beginning bioinformatician. Moreover, you can modify existing open source programs to deal with cutting-edge problems or to customize your pipeline. Apart from your computational and analysis work, most of the reviewer also prefers the open source based results so that they can validate the results if validation required.

2. Code headache

As a bioinformatician you are supposed to know the basics of programming languages, and if you are not good at it, then please learn it as soon as possible because you are not a bio-analyst but biological programmers. The open source programs usually lack dedicated service and support teams (often because they were the product of an overworked doc/postdoc!) so you are responsible for troubleshooting your own errors most of the time. We commonly receive the HELP email to support and assist to setup the pipeline; you can also find this kind of request on any QA forum. I personally believe this coding horror brings the biggest downside of open-source programs; where you need some programming skills in order to implement the program in your pipeline. But, if you are not able to fix the pipeline and modify the open source code according to your requirements them you should re-think on your bioinformatician name tag!!!

3. Dive into the codes

Some of the biologist turn bioinformatician says “if you can do the same thing with commercial software then why to get migraine with weird codes”, well this statement looks to me that guys are keen to learn swimming but still don’t like to get wet. If you are still using paid software and doing your work by customer support and clicking some of the well-designed GUI button then perhaps you are not interested in learning and trying new and challenging bioinformatics works. You are missing the basic flavour of bioinformatics. Let’s dive into the coding world, I am sure your will enjoy it. I recommend your to swim freely in code’s sea, and enjoy the journey; do not merely watch it from the outside.  

4. Paid does not mean better

The bioinformatics company which are specializes in bioinformatics solutions develop well designed/packed, user friendly software by using a large number of specialised scientist, programmers and support staff. They also provide good services to accomplice your biological analysis work. This means that if you hit a ‘snag’ with your data, help is likely only a phone call away! These companies price their products competitively against the cost of a dedicated bioinformatician. You may be able to afford the program, but not the additional staff! Additionally, most of the functionality that you need in your analysis is already coded into the program. Need to plot a graph? Just click this button right here. It is that easy. But, as a bioinformatician this is not generally well encouraged approach in biological analysis work, because the software is not available to everyone and your data can’t be validated. Moreover, there is very less chances that anyone will repeat your work or love to do similar kind of research (because not all the labs in the world are rich like yours).

5. Take a caution

In biological analysis work, in which you deal GB/TB of data are having maximum chances of getting errors, so please be careful and always cross check your data before coming to any conclusion. Even an error in two line code can alter your entire analysis and display weird results. Some of the scientist blindly believes on commercial software, which is entirely wrong. Using proprietary tools does not absolve you of the need to actually read and research the type of analysis that you are doing. This is particularly true in the case of genome assembly and annotation.

At the end, I would like to tell only one think that open source solutions allows you to do more cutting edge analysis than the commercial tools. So let’s go for it.

Disclaimer:

This is my personal view. I have nothing to do with any company or open source community. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my current/past employers. I do reserve the right to remove comments left by spammers or off-topic comments.

Genomics England will play a key role in building on the UK’s long track record as leader in medical science advances to push the boundaries by unlocking the power of DNA data. The UK will become the first ever country to introduce this technology in its mainstream health system – leading the global race for better tests, better drugs and above all better, more personalised care.

http://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/100k-genome-project/

SciGenom Research Foundation (SGRF) and Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) are pleased to host the Next-Generation Sequencing and Bioinformatics for Genomics & Healthcare conference.

In the ten years since the first human reference genome was completed for US$3 billion the sequencing technologies have radically changed leading to great reduction in sequencing cost. Today a human genome can be sequenced for under US$ 5000 in less than two weeks. It is expected that by the end of 2015 the cost of sequencing a human genome will drop to below thousand dollars. The next generation sequencing technologies over the past five years have enabled a large number of genomic studies that impact human health and disease. Also, this has made possible the growth of microbial, animal and plant genomics studies. While the data production has increased at a rapid pace challenges remain in analyzing and understanding the data. The conference will cover the next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies, bioinformatics for NGS and applications of NGS in many areas including personalized medicine.

For more info : http://www.scigenomconferences.com/2013/default.php

Requirements
- 3-5 years of relevant bioinformatics experience such as public data mining,
processing, analysing and visualising omics data, etc.
- Ph.D., Masters or Bachelors in Bioinformatics, Biotechnology,
Computational Biology, or related field.
- Understanding of molecular biology and biochemistry.
- Comfort and experience with biological research and data.
- Proficient in a programming language used for bioinformatics such as R or
python.
- Excellent communication skills.
- Ability to summarise and simplify complex analyses for a non-technical
audience.
- Strong analytical skills, curiosity and a knack to solve difficult problems.
- Work well in multi-disciplinary teams with people of vastly different
backgrounds.
- Demonstrated success in collaboration and independent work.

More at https://angel.co/elucidata/jobs/460104-senior-bioinformatics-scientist

CRI-FEM hosts GMPF, an International PhD Program in Genomics and Molecular Physiology of Fruit Crops and Fox-Lab, an international initiative in forest and wood research.
4 positions in high throughput computational metagenomics and systems biology of natural products - deadline September 30th, 2013

To support interdisciplinary research, CRI-FEM has established the Computational Biology Centre (CBC).

The mission of CBC is to develop systems-level integrative approaches connecting genotype to phenotype with a special focus on genome-wide analyses and next generation sequencing technologies.

CRI-FEM is seeking to attract 4 high calibre scientists in the areas of high throughput computational metagenomics and systems biology of natural products.

Here below the list of the 4 positions:

http://www.fmach.it/eng/Servizi-Generali/Lavora-con-noi/Annunci-lavoro-e-borse-di-studio/Details-of-the-5-positions-in-high-throughput-computational-metagenomics-and-systems-biology-of-natural-products-deadline-September-30th-2013/Post-doc-in-Metagenomics-screening-and-characterization-of-bioactive-microbial-compounds-130_CRI_MSC

http://www.fmach.it/eng/Servizi-Generali/Lavora-con-noi/Annunci-lavoro-e-borse-di-studio/Details-of-the-5-positions-in-high-throughput-computational-metagenomics-and-systems-biology-of-natural-products-deadline-September-30th-2013/Post-doc-in-Modeling-transcriptional-control-programs-at-a-genome-wide-scale-131_CRI_TCP

http://www.fmach.it/eng/Servizi-Generali/Lavora-con-noi/Annunci-lavoro-e-borse-di-studio/Details-of-the-5-positions-in-high-throughput-computational-metagenomics-and-systems-biology-of-natural-products-deadline-September-30th-2013/Technologist-in-Purification-of-plant-bioactive-molecules-from-complex-matrixes-132_CRI_PBM

http://www.fmach.it/eng/Servizi-Generali/Lavora-con-noi/Annunci-lavoro-e-borse-di-studio/Details-of-the-5-positions-in-high-throughput-computational-metagenomics-and-systems-biology-of-natural-products-deadline-September-30th-2013/Researcher-in-Methods-for-algorithmic-and-integrative-genomics-for-metagenomics-134_CRI_AIG

For more information on the CBC or informal inquiries on the advertised positions please contact Dr Duccio Cavalieri (e-mail duccio.cavalieri@fmach.it).

Xiaole Shirley Liu (lead instructor)
Joshua Starmer
Martin Hemberg
Ting Wang
Feng Yue

Ming Tang
Yang Liu
Jack Kang
Scarlett Ge
Jiazhen Rong
Phillip Nicol
Maartin De Vries

We thank many colleagues in the community, who helped Dr. Liu in prepare the STAT115/215 BIO/BST282 course over the years. 

Address of the bookmark: https://liulab-dfci.github.io/bioinfo-combio/

Computational and systems biology: studying the interplay between network topology and biological function, disease, and evolution in molecular (e.g., protein-protein interaction) networks.

Computational chemistry: protein folding; computational drug discovery and design.

Synthetic biology.

More at http://www.cse.nd.edu/~tmilenko/index.html