Bioinformatician are not anti-social; We are just genome friendly.

Bioinformatician would love to change the biological world, but they won't give us the genetic code :P

If at first you don't succeed; call it version 1.0

The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty: it's actually have several genomes.

I'm BioGeek.

Fedup with LIPS, try God script.

Idiot, Go ahead, make my data!

Thank god, my genome just compiled.

Error message: "Out of space on genome drive:"

Shut up mobile elements, or i'll flush you out.

Never underestimate the internet bandwidth, u gotta incomplete.

Applied fuzzy logic to understand God's logic?

Warning! Overflow, delete chromosome !

Be nice to the BioGeek, for all you know they might be the next curator!

Beware of computational biologist they screw genes and protein.

Warning! Your genome is full of garbage, delete it !

Bad or missing mouse genome. Spank the cat? (Y/N)

Genome make very fast, very accurate mistakes.

Let's BLAST it.

Some genome never has transposons. It just develops random features.

Go watch CINEMA and have BLAST.

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijpg/2011/373875/

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cvit/

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fact - for instance - that the technology cycle in the bioinformatics world is very short, the actual knowledge becomes outdated in a few months or years.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!

Address of the bookmark: https://www.bioconductor.org/packages/devel/bioc/vignettes/QuasR/inst/doc/QuasR.html

For knowledge about Linux and their importance amongst bioinformatician plesae read this article "An introduction to Linux for bioinformatics" by Paul Stothard.

Linux cheat sheet at http://bioinformaticsonline.com/file/view/87/linux-cheat-sheet

Please browse for futher useful linux pages on right hand side ...

Key Features of BLAST:
1. Sequence Comparison: BLAST searches for local alignments between the query sequence and sequences in a database. It identifies regions of similarity, which can help infer functional and evolutionary relationships.

2. Speed and Efficiency: BLAST uses heuristic algorithms, making it faster than exhaustive search methods, suitable for large-scale database searches.

3. Versatility: There are several versions of BLAST for different types of sequence comparisons:
- blastn: Compares a nucleotide query sequence against a nucleotide sequence database.
- blastp: Compares a protein query sequence against a protein sequence database.
- blastx: Compares a nucleotide query sequence translated in all reading frames against a protein sequence database.
- tblastn: Compares a protein query sequence against a nucleotide sequence database translated in all reading frames.
- tblastx: Compares the six-frame translations of a nucleotide query sequence against the six-frame translations of a nucleotide sequence database.

4. Scoring and E-value: BLAST results are scored based on the quality and length of the alignments. The E-value (expect value) indicates the number of alignments one can expect to find by chance, with lower E-values representing more significant matches.

5. Output Formats: BLAST provides results in various formats, including plain text, HTML, XML, and JSON, making it adaptable for different types of analyses and integrations with other tools.

Applications of BLAST:
- Genomic Research: Identifying genes, understanding genetic diversity, and mapping genome sequences.
- Protein Function Prediction: Inferring the function of unknown proteins by comparing them to known protein sequences.
- Evolutionary Studies: Exploring evolutionary relationships between organisms by comparing their genetic material.
- Medical Research: Identifying pathogens, understanding disease mechanisms, and developing treatments by comparing sequences of interest.

Overall, BLAST is an essential tool in bioinformatics, offering a reliable and efficient way to analyze and interpret biological sequence data.

Screen is like a window manager for your console. It will allow you to keep multiple terminal sessions running and easily switch between them. It also protects you from disconnection, because the screen session doesn’t end when you get disconnected.

You’ll need to make sure that screen is installed on the server you are connecting to. If that server is Ubuntu or Debian, just use this command:

sudo apt-get install screen

Now you can start a new screen session by just typing screen at the command line. You’ll be shown some information about screen. Hit enter, and you’ll be at a normal prompt.

To disconnect (but leave the session running)

Hit Ctrl + A and then Ctrl + D in immediate succession. You will see the message [detached]

To reconnect to an already running session

screen -r

To reconnect to an existing session, or create a new one if none exists

screen -D -r

To create a new window inside of a running screen session

Hit Ctrl + A and then C in immediate succession. You will see a new prompt.

To switch from one screen window to another

Hit Ctrl + A and then Ctrl + A in immediate succession.

To list open screen windows

Hit Ctrl + A and then W in immediate succession

Address of the bookmark: http://www.dkfz.de/en/applied-bioinformatics/telomerehunter/telomerehunter.html

'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.

Availability: RAMI is licensed under GNU GPL and can be run or downloaded from http://www.acgt.se/online.html.

Address of the bookmark: https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/bioinformatics/btp051