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.  

We are now seeking a postdoc scholarship holder with strong background in transcriptomics to use this large collection of data for integrative studies. Focus will be on advanced bioinformatics and statistical analysis of data from high-throughput sequencing including integration with the other platforms.

The scholarship holder must have a PhD with an outstanding research and publication record and will be selected based on her/his excellence and her/his skills. A PhD should have been awarded less than five years before the deadline of the application. The scholarship holder must have a strong background in bioinformatics, computer science, computational biology or equivalent with a profound knowledge about biology and biostatistics.

Your complete application must be received at KTH no later than 2018-01-15.

https://www.kth.se/en/om/work-at-kth/stipendier/postdoctoral-scholarship-in-bioinformatics-with-focus-on-transcriptomics-and-data-integration-1.779571

Address of the bookmark: http://readiab.org/

Courses

Old courses (2012-2014)

Metagenomics Workshop

2015 November - Uppsala
2016 November - Uppsala
2017 November - Uppsala

Introduction to Bioinformatics Using NGS Data

2015 February - Uppsala 
2015 May - Gothenburg
2015 September - Uppsala
2015 November - Lund
2016 January - Uppsala
2016 April - Linköping
2016 September - Uppsala
2016 November - Umeå
2017 January - Uppsala
2017 May - Gothenburg
2017 September - Lund
2017 November - Uppsala
2018 February - Uppsala

Introduction to Genome Annotation

2015 April - Uppsala
2016 April - Uppsala
2017 April - Uppsala
2018 May - Uppsala

De Novo Genome Assembly

2016 November - Uppsala
2017 November - Uppsala

RNA-seq course

2015 October - Uppsala
2016 April - Uppsala
2016 October - Uppsala
2017 March - Uppsala
2017 November - Uppsala
RNAseq tutorials

R Programming Foundations for Life Scientists

2016 November - Uppsala
2017 Mars - Uppsala

Single cell RNA sequencing analysis

2017 October - Uppsala

Address of the bookmark: https://scilifelab.github.io/courses/

Address of the bookmark: http://www.rdatamining.com/

Awk is a programming language that is specifically designed for quickly manipulating space delimited data. Although you can achieve all its functionality with Perl, awk is simpler in many practical cases.

Why awk? You can replace a pipeline of 'stuff | grep | sed | cut...' with a single call to awk. For a simple script, most of the timelag is in loading these apps into memory, and it's much faster to do it all with one. This is ideal for something like an openbox pipe menu where you want to generate something on the fly. You can use awk to make a neat one-liner for some quick job in the terminal, or build an awk section into a shell script. You can find a lot of online tutorials, but here I will only show a few examples which cover most of bioinformatician daily uses of awk.

choose rows where column 3 is larger than column 5:

awk '$3>$5' input.txt > output.txt

extract column 2,4,5:

awk '{print $2,$4,$5}' input.txt > output.txt

awk 'BEGIN{OFS="\t"}{print $2,$4,$5}' input.txt

show rows between 20th and 80th:

awk 'NR>=20&&NR<=80' input.txt > output.txt

calculate the average of column 2:

awk '{x+=$2}END{print x/NR}' input.txt

regex (egrep):

awk '/^test[0-9]+/' input.txt

calculate the sum of column 2 and 3 and put it at the end of a row or replace the first column:

awk '{print $0,$2+$3}' input.txt

awk '{$1=$2+$3;print}' input.txt

join two files on column 1:

awk 'BEGIN{while((getline<"file1.txt")>0)l[$1]=$0}$1 in l{print $0"\t"l[$1]}' file2.txt > output.txt

count number of occurrence of column 2 (uniq -c):

awk '{l[$2]++}END{for (x in l) print x,l[x]}' input.txt

apply "uniq" on column 2, only printing the first occurrence (uniq):

awk '!($2 in l){print;l[$2]=1}' input.txt

count different words (wc):

awk '{for(i=1;i!=NF;++i)c[$i]++}END{for (x in c) print x,c[x]}' input.txt

deal with simple CSV:

awk -F, '{print $1,$2}'

substitution (sed is simpler in this case):

awk '{sub(/test/, "no", $0);print}' input.txt

OK now here's where to read this stuff properly explained. roll

Two thorough tutorials:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html

http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Awk.html

A famous list of useful one-liners - though they're short, many are quite tricky:

http://www.pement.org/awk/awk1line.txt

And some nice explanations of those one-liners. After reading this you'll have a pretty good grasp!

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/awk-one-li … -part-one/

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/ten-awk-ti … -pitfalls/

(Indian Council of Medical Research )
Jehangir Merwanji Street, Parel, Mumbai 400 012

Advertisement No. 1/NIRRH/Ph.D. 2013
Admission to Ph.D. Programme – 2013

National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health, Mumbai, a premier institute of the Indian Council of Medical Research, conducts basic, clinical and operational research in different areas of reproductive health. The thrust areas of research include: Fertility Regulation, Infertility and Reproductive Disorders, Reproductive Tract Infections, Maternal and Child Health, Osteoporosis, Genetic Disorders, Stem Cell Biology, Structural Biology, Bioinformatics and Reproductive Toxicology. Institute is affiliated to the University of Mumbai for the award of Ph.D. degree in Applied Biology, Biochemistry, Life Sciences and Biotechnology. The institute invites applications from young and bright students for enrollment in Ph.D. programme.

More at http://www.nirrh.res.in/announcements/phd_program_2013.htm

Workshops are conducted in regular intervals on Drug Designing, Protein Modeling and Simulation, Chemoinformatics, Bioinformatics etc.The workshops are highly beneficial for working professionals, students, researcher for enhancements of the skills in short duration.

More at http://homes.sice.indiana.edu/yye/lab/teaching/spring2017-I529/

More tutorial at 

http://calla.rnet.missouri.edu/cheng_courses/mlbioinfo/mlbioinfo.htm

http://www.raetschlab.org/lectures/MLBioinformatics

http://www.raetschlab.org/lectures/bertinoro08

Book at 

https://personal.utdallas.edu/~pradiptaray/teaching/7_deep_learning_bioinfo.pdf

Address of the bookmark: http://homes.sice.indiana.edu/yye/lab/teaching/spring2017-I529/