In C, "sequence statements" are imperatives. The "selection" is the "if then else" statement, and the iteration is satisfied by a number of statements, such as the "while," " do," and the "for," while the case-type statement is satisfied by the "switch" statement.

Pseudocode is an artificial and informal language that helps programmers develop algorithms. Pseudocode is a "text-based" detail (algorithmic) design tool.

The rules of Pseudocode are reasonably straightforward. All statements showing "dependency" are to be indented. These include while, do, for, if, switch. Examples below will illustrate this notion.

GUIDE TO PSEUDOCODE LEVEL OF DETAIL: Given record/file descriptions, pseudocode should be created in sufficient detail so as to directly support the programming effort. It is the purpose of pseudocode to elaborate on the algorithmic detail and not just cite an abstraction.

Examples:

1.

If student's grade is greater than or equal to 60
    Print "passed"
else
    Print "failed"  
endif

2.

  
Set total to zero
Set grade counter to one
While grade counter is less than or equal to ten
    Input the next grade
    Add the grade into the total
endwhile 
Set the class average to the total divided by ten
Print the class average.

3.

Initialize total to zero
Initialize counter to zero
Input the first grade
while the user has not as yet entered the sentinel
   add this grade into the running total 
   add one to the grade counter  
   input the next grade (possibly the sentinel)
endwhile

if the counter is not equal to zero
   set the average to the total divided by the counter
   print the average  
else
   print 'no grades were entered' 
endif 

4.

initialize passes to zero
initialize failures to zero
initialize student to one
while student counter is less than or equal to ten
    input the next exam result  
    if the student passed

add one to passes else add one to failures add one to student counter endif endwhile print the number of passes print the number of failures if eight or more students passed print "raise tuition" endif

5.

Larger example:  

NOTE:  NEVER ANY DATA DECLARATIONS IN PSEUDOCODE

Print out appropriate heading and make it pretty
While not EOF do:
     Scan over blanks and white space until a char is found 
	(get first character on the line)
     set can't-be-ascending-flag to 0
     set consec cntr to 1
     set ascending cntr to 1
     putchar first char of string to screen
     set read character to hold character
     While next character read != blanks and white space
          putchar out on screen
          if new char = hold char + 1
               add 1 to consec cntr
               set hold char = new char
               continue
          endif
          if new char >= hold char 
               if consec cntr < 3 
                    set consec cntr to 1
               endif
               set hold char = new char
               continue
          endif
          if new char < hold char
               if consec cntr < 3
                    set consec cntr to 1
               endif
               set hold char = new char
               set can't be ascending flag to 1
               continue
           endif
     end while
     if consec cntr >= 3 
          printf (Appropriate message 1 and skip a line)
          add 1 to consec total
     endif
     if  can't be ascending flag = 0
          printf (Appropriate message 2 and skip a line)
          add 1 to ascending total
     else
          printf (Sorry message and skip a line)
          add 1 to sorry total
     endif
end While
Print out totals:  Number of consecs, ascendings, and sorries.
Stop

Some Keywords That Should be Used And Additional Points

For looping and selection, The keywords that are to be used include Do While...EndDo; Do Until...Enddo; While .... Endwhile is acceptable. Also, Loop .... endloop is also VERY good and is language independent. Case...EndCase; If...Endif; Call ... with (parameters); Call; Return ....; Return; When;

Always use scope terminators for loops and iteration.

As verbs, use the words Generate, Compute, Process, etc. Words such as set, reset, increment, compute, calculate, add, sum, multiply, ... print, display, input, output, edit, test , etc. with careful indentation tend to foster desirable pseudocode. Also, using words such as Set and Initialize, when assigning values to variables is also desirable.

More on Formatting and Conventions in Pseudocoding

• INDENTATION in pseudocode should be identical to its implementation in a programming language. Try to indent at least four spaces.
• As noted above, the pseudocode entries are to be cryptic, AND SHOULD NOT BE PROSE. NO SENTENCES.
• No flower boxes (discussed ahead) in your pseudocode.
• Do not include data declarations in your pseudocode.
• But do cite variables that are initialized as part of their declarations. E.g. "initialize count to zero" is a good entry.

  ---

  Function Calls, Function Documentation, and Pseudocode
• Calls to Functions should appear as:
• Returns in functions should appear as:
• Function headers should appear as:
• Note that in C, arguments and parameters such as "fieldn" could be written: "pointer to fieldn ...."
• Functions called with addresses should be written as:
• Function headers containing pointers should be indicated as:
• Returns in functions where a pointer is returned:
• It would not hurt the appearance of your pseudocode to draw a line or make your function header line "bold" in your pseudocode. Try to set off your functions.
• Try to use scope terminators in your pseudocode and source code too. It really hels the readability of the text.

  ---

  Source Code
• EVERY function should have a flowerbox PRECEDING IT. This flower box is to include the functions name, the main purpose of the function, parameters it is expecting (number and type), and the type of the data it returns. All of these listed items are to be on separate lines with spaces in between each explanatory item.
• FORMAT of flowerbox should be

   

  	 ********************************************************
  	 Function:   ( cryptic text describing single function
  		     ....... (indented like this) 	
  		     .......
  	 Calls:      Start listing functions "this" function calls
  		     Show these functions:  one per line, indented
  
  	 Called by:  List of functions that calls "this" function
  		     Show these functions:  one per line, indented.
  
  	 Input Parameters:  list, if appropriate; else None
  	 
  	 Returns:    List, if appropriate.
  	 ****************************************************************
  

• INDENTATION is critically important in Source Code. Follow standard examples given in class. If in doubt, ASK. Always indent statements within IFs, FOR loops, WILLE loops, SWITCH statements, etc. a consistent number of spaces, such as four. Alternatively, use the tab key. One or two spaces is insufficient.
• Use scope terminators at the end of if statements, for statements, while statements, and at the end of functions. It will make your program much more readable.

  SPELLING ERRORS ARE NOT ACCEPTABLE

Upcoming Deadlines
Regular Paper Submission: July 31, 2017
Regular Paper Authors Notification: October 16, 2017
Regular Paper Camera Ready and Registration: October 30, 2017

The purpose of the International Conference on Bioinformatics Models, Methods and Algorithms is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in the application of computational systems, algorithmic concepts and information technologies to address challenging problems in Biomedical research with a particular focus on the emerging problems in Bioinformatics and computational biology. There is a tremendous need to explore how mathematical, statistical and computational models can be used to better understand biological processes and systems, while developing new methodologies and tools to analysis the massive currently-available biological data. Areas of interest to this community include systems biology, sequence analysis, biostatistics, image analysis, network and graph models, scientific data management and data mining, machine learning, pattern recognition, computational evolutionary biology, computational genomics and proteomics, and related areas.

Candidates interested in the position should contact me in advance by email to: g.stracquadanio@essex.ac.uk

The deadline for the application is 28/02/2017; info about the application can be found on the Essex CSEE website.

With advances in Cancer Genomics, Mutation Annotation Format (MAF) is being widley accepted and used to store variants detected. The Cancer Genome Atlas Project has seqenced over 30 different cancers with sample size of each cancer type being over 200. The resulting data consisting of genetic variants is stored in the form of Mutation Annotation Format. This package attempts to summarize, analyze, annotate and visualize MAF files in an efficient manner either from TCGA sources or any in-house studies as long as the data is in MAF format. Maftools can also handle ICGC Simple Somatic Mutation format.

maftools is on bioRxiv

Please cite the below if you find this tool useful for you.

Mayakonda, A. and H.P. Koeffler, Maftools: Efficient analysis, visualization and summarization of MAF files from large-scale cohort based cancer studies. bioRxiv, 2016. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/052662

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/PoisonAlien/maftools

Ph.D. in Bioinformatics/ Agricultural Statistics/ Statistics/ Computer Science/ Computer Application or equivalent or Master’s in Bioinformatics/ Agricultural Statistics/ Statistics/ Computer Science/ Computer Application or equivalent with 4 years or 5 years of Bachelor’s degree having 1st Division or 60% marks or equivalent overall grade point average, with at least two years of research experience as evidenced from fellowship/ associateship/ training/ other engagements.

Knowledge in System Biology/ Statistical and computational Genomics/ Bioinformatics
Knowledge in computer programming, LINUX OS.
Expertise in use of R/other Bioinformatics software

More at http://iasri.res.in/employment/2017/cabin_advertisement_RA_SRF_YP_Mar2017.pdf

Phenomics of Moisture Deficit Stress Tolerance and Nitrogen Use December 31, 2019

Research Associate (RA) Two (2)

Ph.D. in Bioinformatics/ Agricultural Statistics/ Statistics/ Computer Science/ Computer Application or equivalent or System Administrator/ Computer expert for database development, development of phenome data bank and virtual phenomics facility, data archiving and Efficiency in Rice and Wheat-Phase II (Funded by National Agricultural Science Fund, ICAR) Master’s in Bioinformatics/ Agricultural Statistics/ Statistics/ Computer Science/ Computer Application or equivalent with 4 years or 5 years of Bachelor’s degree having 1st Division or 60% marks or equivalent overall grade point average, with at least two years of research experience as evidenced from fellowship/ associateship/ training/ other engagements. maintenance; Development of image analysis algorithms, APIs and IAPs.

Knowledge in System Biology/ Statistical and computational Genomics/ Bioinformatics
Knowledge of programming in LINUX/R/Perl/JAVA/PHP/JSP and use of various software & tools.
December 31, 2019

Ph.D. in Bioinformatics/ Agricultural Statistics/ Statistics/ Computer Science / Computer Application or equivalent or Master’s in Bioinformatics/ Agricultural Statistics/ Statistics/ Computer Science/ Computer Application or equivalent with 4 years or 5 years of Bachelor’s degree having 1st Division or 60% marks or equivalent overall grade point average, with at least two years of research experience as evidenced from fellowship/ associateship/ training/ other engagements.

Knowledge of Statistical and Computational Genomics/ Bioinformatics.
Knowledge of programming in LINUX/R/Perl/JAVA/PHP/JSP and use of various software & tools.
March 31, 2020

TMAP is a fast and accurate alignment software for short and long nucleotide sequences produced by next-generation sequencing technologies.

• The latest TMAP is unsupported. To use a supported version, please see the TMAP version associated with a Torrent Suite release below.

• Get the latest source code:

  git clone git://github.com/iontorrent/TMAP.git
   cd TMAP
   git submodule init
   git submodule update

https://github.com/iontorrent/TS/tree/master/Analysis/TMAP

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/iontorrent/TS/tree/master/Analysis/TMAP

 All the nodes in the tree are clickable. This displays various information and options:

• The species name (and the associated common name if there is one)
• The rank (kingdom, family, class, species...)
• Ability to go to the corresponding node/species on NCBI web site (displayed in a new window)
• Possibility to download the corresponding subtree in newick extended format
• Possibilty to get the whole lineage from the current node/tip to the root of the tree.

Address of the bookmark: http://lifemap-ncbi.univ-lyon1.fr/

Date: April 24th. 2017 Last Date: May 6th 2017
PROJECT ID: 632

The following posts are urgently required to be filled for the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India funded project jointly running with IIIT-Hyderabad & JNU, entitled "Computational Core for Plant Metabolomics" administrated by Prof Indira Ghosh, School of Computational and Integrative Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi-110 067.
NB: For all the posts, preference will be given to candidates with a good knowledge of Python and/or R in UNIX platform , knowledge of JAVA will also get a special consideration.

1. RA / Research Associate (Metabolic engineering/Computational Biologist)

Salary: Rs. 36000/- + HRA

Vacancy: 1

Essential Qualifications: PhD in Bioinformatics /Mathematics/Computer Science with experience in analyzing high throughput omics-based data/Analysis of Network Biology/Chemoinformatics/Computational Biology related Software development. Published paper in the field is a must to prove the experience. Special consideration will be given if have experience in Industry, teaching & product development.

Desired Skills: Prior experience in handling and guiding bioinformatics, metabolomics data, planning of new research area in metabolic driven network , collaborating with industry , preparing and filing reports etc. Will be expected to communicate with user groups and coordinate with LIMS group in Hyderabad and the Cheminformatics group in Delhi.

2. Project SRF (Network model building/Systems biology integration)

Salary*: Rs.18000/- + HRA

Vacancy: 1

Essential Qualifications: M.Tech in Computational Biology with project experience or Masters / B.Tech in Basic Sciences with at least 2yrs of research experience in Bioinformatics/Mathematical Model building using Computational Biology tools & related Database / Network analysis etc. For M.Sc/B.Tech, Published paper in peer-reviewed Journal whereas for M.Tech, the degree obtained in computational biology is a must.

Desired Skills: Will be expected to manage ongoing research activities in LIMS, interact with LIMS group, build network model using data compiled by experimentalist, prepare and file reports and associated project work etc. Familiarity with plant systems biology and genomics /metabolite resources related to plant metabolomics is desirable.

More at http://www.jnu.ac.in/Career/currentjobs.htm

https://bienkocrosettolabs.org/

Dr Altan Kara is a Bioinformatics specialist at the faculty of Gene Engineering and Biotechnology Institute at TUBITAK MAM Research Center. His research interest revolves around the cancer informatics and computational aided-drug design. I applaud Dr Altan for clearly setting out both his expectations of people that join his lab/university in addition to listing his responsibilities to his research members at TUBITAK MAM Research Institüte. Hopefully, this interview will prove useful to others in the field, especially to those who are just starting their bioinformatics careers.

You can find out more about Dr Altan by visiting his (well documented) lab page (http://gmbe.mam.tubitak.gov.tr/en) and BOL page http://bioinformaticsonline.com/profile/altan . And now, on to the BOL:“Tryst with a Bioinformatician” interview series ...

• What push you to join Computational Biology/Bioinformatics?

According to me, bioinformatics is the center of modern biological research and if a researcher wants to discover new biological insights by evaluating the globally produced biological data to derivate unified solutions for specific biological problems, learning bioinformatics is the only way to achieve this goal.

• What fascinates you about Computational Biology/Bioinformatics?

It's flexibility. As well known, there are highly diverse and complex biological questions are waiting to be enlightened and it's impossible to bring solutions to this diversity by using similar approaches. Thus, the employed method has to be unique for the targeted biological problem and by using bioinformatics tools this can be easily achieved. 

• What is the one word you would use to describe yourself?

Bioinformatician. :)

• Can you please describe your research work in a nutshell for BOL users.

At my current Institute, I am working in the field of cancer bioinformatics. Briefly, the overall aim of the project which I am working for (AKMARK (Project CODE:5153403)) is, applying a bioinformatics-supported genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome analysis to reveal the molecular profile of the disease through an integrated approach, and to develop an early diagnosis and scanning kit based on this profile. Alterations in the gene, transcript, protein, and metabolite profiles between normal tissue, normal tissue adjoined to the tumor (reactive stroma), tumor tissue, lymph node metastasis, and blood samples taken from the same patient and the reflection of these changes in some other selected body fluids will be revealed within the scope of the project. The molecular structures involved in the development and progression of NSCLC will be determined and relations with the clinical, tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) staging and histology will be made. The development of a diagnostic kit for immediate clinical purposes and an electrochemical biosensor for quick on-site applications are targeted through the development of a number of antibody and aptamer formed against the most specific biomarker selected from the panel.

• Is there anything else we should know about you and your research?

Besides AKMARK, I am also in preparation of having a side project that aims for the development of a computational method to design inhibitors for prokaryotic two-component systems. In this project, I will be in collaboration with Prof. Maria Kontoyianni, SIUE: Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, School of Pharmacy.

• What was your greatest scientific disappointment in life till now?

So far I do not experience any memorable scientific disappointment in my life. :)

• What major research challenges and problems did you face yet? How did you handle them?

The major challenge which I faced so far in my scientific career was predicting the interaction between the prokaryotic two-component proteins. To be able to accurately predict the interactions between these proteins, I create a meta-predictor by using a support vector machine. By using this technique I integrated six different protein-protein interaction methods in a way to cover disadvantage of one method with the advantage of another one. The meta-predictor which I developed during this work is accessible via http://metapred2cs.ibers.aber.ac.uk/ and for more detailed information about the system the articles with the PMID IDs; PMID: 27378293 and PMID: 26384938 can be read.

• What's your all-time favourite bioinformatics package, and why?

For me, the best bioinformatics package is R/Bioconductor. The reason why I like this package is, it provides lots of useful tools for comprehensive analysis and comparison of high-throughput experimental data in an integrated manner and besides lots of the packages it provides, it is open source and also open for development. As a result, it provides strong and flexible ways to do science.

• In bioinformatics, do you see yourself in which of the following roles-scientist, analyst, developer, engineer or pure academician?

Scientist / Developer.

• What will you like to accomplish in next five years / ten years?

For my current research, I would like to design a pipeline to automatically integrate and analyse omics data for cancer research which will be specifically aiming for biomarker and novel drug target discovery. In addition to this, I also like to develop another pipeline for prokaryotic TCS protein structure prediction and inhibitor design.

• When you will be retired, what would you tell next generation bioinformaticians?

Bioinformatics is not all about scripting and researchers who study in this field should never expect a tool to do their analyses for them. Besides computational skills, a bioinformatician must have a strong biological background in his/her research area which will allow them to understand if anything went wrong during their run by only looking at the results instead of just blindly trusting the output of the bioinformatics tools.

• What you always miss in bioinformatics when you will no longer working in this field?

Bioinformatics is open to doing multi-discipliner research with scientists all around the world. As a result, while I studying in this field I can interactively learn a lot from wide range research community. I think this is the one thing which I will miss the most.

• If there will be bioinformatics company owned by you in future, What are your company focus and aim?

With the increasing amount of data in databases, there is already a massive need for effective methods to eliminate the manipulated data and reach to clean/useful information. As days pass, the requirement of data mining will be the first step of any research project. For this reason, the major goal of my bioinformatics company will be developing effective tools to eliminate manipulated datasets and information that exist in the literature and provide trustworthy clean information/datasets for researchers.

• How much bioinformatics change in 2050, according to your wild imagination?

Bioinformatics is a field that constantly and dynamically changes. As the bioinformatics progress, new tools and methods become available and they provide a better application of existing methods or totally new methods that offer an alternative solution to various biological problems. A long with these updates, developers also provide easy to use GUIs for most of the tools. Considering this, if the field carries on developing like this, every single researcher with a strong biological background can be able to perform bioinformatics analyses by him/herself without needing a professional help. As a result, almost all of the bioinformaticians will be responsible just for development of new methods/tools.

• What would one piece of advice you give someone who's trying to reinvent themselves and enter into bioinformatics sector?

Bioinformatics is a wide field with a lot of career options. Thus, if a researcher likes to step into this field first he/she should be clear about the branch of the bioinformatics they like to study in. Following to this decision they should first learn at least one programing language and investigate the ways of how other researcher employed that language in their researches and WHY? A researcher, in this field, should never create and use copy paste scripts but always must understand WHY the other researcher worked in that way. Knowing the answer of this question is the only way to learn bioinformatics. Besides, a researcher in the field of bioinformatics (from any branch) must always be good about the environmental control. In other words, one should always easily control input output directories, modify files or directories, annotate and modify employed scripts during the research and should not allow any confusion during the different stages of the research. Finally, they should not blindly trust the output of a tool/software but do a benchmarking test for each of the tools which they decided to utilise in their research. In addition to this, even if the tools pass the benchmarking, researchers should have a good biological background in their field to tell if anything when wrong during the process by only looking the output(s) of the employed pipelines/packages/tools.