BOL: Related items

Bioinformatics: The Bridge Between Curiosity and Discovery

BioStar — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 05:16:49 -0600

In the sprawling universe of modern science, bioinformatics stands as one of the most transformative and empowering fields of our time. It is where biology meets computation, where data becomes meaning, and where curiosity becomes discovery. If you’ve stepped into this world—or are considering it—here’s your reminder: you’re part of a revolution.

Why Bioinformatics Matters More Than Ever

Every day, our world generates massive amounts of biological data—from genome sequences to microbiome profiles to real-time pathogen surveillance. Hidden within these datasets are the answers to some of the greatest challenges humanity faces: emerging diseases, antimicrobial resistance, environmental stress, genetic disorders, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Bioinformatics isn’t just a skill.
It’s the language of the future of biology.

By mastering it, you give yourself the power to:

Decode genomes and understand life at its most fundamental level

Identify patterns no microscope could ever reveal

Predict disease outbreaks before they occur

Accelerate drug discovery with computational precision

Contribute to open-source tools that empower scientists worldwide

You don’t just follow science—you drive it.

Every Expert Was Once a Beginner

Many newcomers feel intimidated. Command-line interfaces. R scripts. Python packages. Next-generation sequencing data. Complex machine learning models.

But here’s the truth: every bioinformatician started exactly where you are now—curious, unsure, but excited.

No one writes perfect code on day one.

No one understands genomics pipelines immediately.

What makes you a bioinformatician is not perfection, but perseverance.

When your script throws a cryptic error…
When your data refuses to format…
When your pipeline runs for 6 hours only to crash…

Remember: this is part of the journey.
Every error teaches you. Every retry strengthens you. Every breakthrough energizes you.

Bioinformatics Is Not Just a Career—It’s a Mindset

It’s the mindset of:

Problem-solving.

Continuous learning.

Turning chaos into clarity.

Seeing what others can’t.

Bioinformaticians are detectives of biological complexity. You sit at the intersection of innovation, using tools that can shape public health, medicine, agriculture, and ecology. Few fields give you such direct impact on the world.

Your Contribution Matters

As you work on your script, pipeline, genome, or model, remember:

Somewhere, your analysis might contribute to:

A new therapy

A faster diagnostic test

A better understanding of a pathogen

A more resilient crop

An open-source dataset that helps thousands

A discovery that rewrites textbooks

Your code may be small, but its ripple effect is powerful.

The Future Is Bioinformatics—And You Are Part of It

The world is shifting. Wet labs are integrating AI. Hospitals rely on genomic insights. Farmers use gene-level predictions. Governments monitor disease in real time. Students launch pipelines that become global tools.

This is a golden era—and you are not late.
You are exactly where you need to be.

Keep Pushing. Keep Learning. Keep Discovering.

Bioinformatics is a journey filled with challenges, but also with unmatched rewards.

So the next time you feel stuck, frustrated, or overwhelmed, remember:
You’re building the science of tomorrow.

Be proud. Stay curious. Keep going.
Your work matters more than you think.

Automatic Filtering, Trimming, Error Removing and Quality Control for fastq data

Rahul Nayak — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 05:10:23 -0600

Automatic Filtering, Trimming, Error Removing and Quality Control for fastq data
AfterQC can simply go through all fastq files in a folder and then output three folders: good, bad and QC folders, which contains good reads, bad reads and the QC results of each fastq file/pair.
Currently it supports processing data from HiSeq 2000/2500/3000/4000, Nextseq 500/550, MiniSeq...and other Illumina 1.8 or newer formats

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/OpenGene/AfterQC

Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab)-Sweden

Sat, 10 May 2014 06:22:30 -0500

Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) is a national center for molecular biosciences with focus on health and environmental research. The center combines frontline technical expertise with advanced knowledge of translational medicine and molecular bioscience. SciLifeLab is a national resource and a collaboration between four universities: Karolinska Institutet, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm University and Uppsala University.

Webpage : https://www.scilifelab.se/about-us/
Opportunity: https://www.scilifelab.se/about-us/career/

The Home Microbiome Project

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 15:21:49 -0500

The Home Microbiome Project is an initiative aimed at uncovering the dynamic co-associations between people's bacteria and the bacteria found in their homes.The hope is that the data and project will show that routine monitoring of the microbial diversity of your body and of the environment in which you live is possible. Computer animation courtesy the Biology & Built Environment (BioBE) Center, University of Oregon and Cameron Slayden at Cosmocyte. http://vimeo.com/90059732 BioBE on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/user22991553

Mercator: Multiple Whole-Genome Orthology Map Construction

Jit — Tue, 19 May 2020 16:46:22 -0500

Whole-genome homology maps attempt to identify the evolutionary relationships between and within multiple genomes. The term "syntenic" is often used to describe regions of multiple genomes that are believed to have evolved from the same region in an ancestral genome. However, it has been pointed out that this use of the term is incorrect (Passarge et al. 1999) and thus we will use the terms "homologous", "orthologous", and "paralogous" instead. Ideally, given K genomes, we would like to identify all orthologous genomic regions as well as paralogous regions within each genome and hypothetical ancestral genome. Maps listing these relationships are extremely valuable to researchers performing comparative analyses of genomic sequence. Here we present our initial work in the form a program called Mercator that constructs orthology maps between multiple whole genomes.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~cdewey/mercator/

Professor/Associate Professor/ Assistant Professor at Chettinad Academy of Research and Education

Sat, 24 May 2014 00:00:15 -0500

OPEN FACULTY POSITION

Chettinad Academy of Research and Education (CARE) invites applications from eligible and translational research-oriented candidates to the posts of Professor/Associate Professor/ Assistant Professor Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and Pharmaceutical Chemistry.

Emoluments: As per UGC norms (Adequate Compensation for Postdoctoral/Teaching experience)

Candidates fulfilling the eligibility criteria as per the UGC norms can send their full CV with copies of certificates and reference letters to the following address by post or by e-mail on or before 31st May 2014

The Registrar,
Chettinad Academy of Research and Education,
Chettinad Health City
Kelambakkam, Chennai 603 103
Tamil Nadu
T +91 (0)44 4741 1000
F +91 (0)44 4741 1011
Email: jobs @chettinadhealthcity.com

Advertisement: http://182.73.176.163/chc/ads2014.pdf

Collection of Graph Visualization tools !

Neel — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 02:57:42 -0600

Standard approaches to genome inference and analysis relate sequences to a single linear reference genome. This is efficient but has a fundamental problem: Differences from this reference are hard to observe and describe in a coherent way. Variation and sequence are separated.

https://fungidb.org/fungidb/app/downloads/Current_Release/GultimumBR650/

Address of the bookmark: https://pangenome.github.io/

The Minerva Research Group for Bioinformatics

Tue, 27 May 2014 15:48:14 -0500

The focus of the bioinformatics group is to use computational approaches to gain an insight into genome evolution in primates.

http://www.eva.mpg.de/genetics/bioinformatics/overview.html?Fsize=0%2C%20%40%2F%27

Kelso Group
Department of Evolutionary Genetics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig
Germany
Phone: +49 341 3550 500

Job:
http://www.eva.mpg.de/genetics/bioinformatics/jobs.html?Fsize=0%2C%2B%40

MITObim - mitochondrial baiting and iterative mapping

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 08 May 2018 04:15:25 -0500

This document contains instructions on how to use the MITObim pipeline described in Hahn et al. 2013. The full article can be found here. Kindly cite the article if you are using MITObim in your work. The pipeline was originally developed for Illumina data, but thanks to the versatility of the MIRA assembler, MITObim supports in principle also data from the Iontorrent, 454 and PacBio sequencing platforms.

Below you can find a few basic tutorials for how to run MITObim and I encorage you to give them a try with the testdata that comes with this Repo, just to make sure everything is running smoothly on your system. It'll only take a few minutes and will potentially safe you a lot of time down the line.

I provide further examples here as Jupyter notebooks. Get in touch if you feel like sharing your particular MITObim solution and I'd be happy to put it up here, too!

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/chrishah/MITObim

Monitor running jobs on Linux server

Jitendra Narayan — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 16:18:43 -0500

You as a bioinformatican run lots of program on your servers. Sometime the shared server is also used by your colleague. If server is busy you sometime need to check the running programs and want to monitor the running programs as well. The "top" command will come in handy when you need to find out if things are still running, how long they’ve been running, or how much memory is being used.

‘top’ is very simple to run: type

%% top

You’ll get a screen that looks like this, and is updated regularly:

Simple, right? Heh.

First! Note that you can use ‘q’ or ‘CTRL-C’ to exit from ‘top’.

Now let’s read and understand at each line independently.

The first line:

top - 23:00:48 up 39 days, 2 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

The first line tells you the current time, how long the machine has been up, how many users are logged in, and the short/medium/long-term compute load on the machine. If you run something for a long time, you’ll see these numbers go up. Right now, the machine is basically just sitting there, so these are all close to 0.

The second line:

Tasks: 239 total,   1 running, 238 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

This line tells you how many processes are running. If you are using laptops machines it’s not so interesting because you really are the only one using this machine.

Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st

This line contains the CPU load. The first two numbers are how busy the system is doing computation (“us” stands for “user”) and how busy the system is doing system-y things like accessing disks or network (“sy” stands for “system”). We’ll talk more about this later.

Mem:   49457320k total,    3492174k used, 14535596k free,    1435148k buffers

This should be easy to understand – how much memory you’re using!

Swap:   539356k total,   28332k used,   836562k free,    29862014k cached

Swap is just on-disk memory that can be used to “swap” out programs from main memory. Again, we’ll talk about this later.:

PID USER      PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+ COMMAND
1 root      39 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0   246:57.22 kipmi0
2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S 0.0 0.0   0:00.00 migration/0

And... finally! What’s actually running! The two most important numbers are the %CPU and %MEM towards the right, as well as the COMMAND. This tells you how compute- and memory-intensive your program is. Right now, nothing’s running so the numbers aren’t very interesting, but just wait until we run something...