1. Make friends with local bioinformatics groups
2. Talk to your computing group
3. Obtain clear expectations
4. Rewrite your job description
5. Papers
6. Attend bioinformatics meetings
7. Try first, ask later

Address of the bookmark: http://biomickwatson.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/a-guide-for-the-lonely-bioinformatician/

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.

The Job detail

Advancing the SNP-discovery and polymorphism assessment work across several germplasm panels representing global genetic diversity
Population genetic and genomic analyses, testing the hypothesis related to adaptation in multiple geographic regions
Develop SNP assays from large scale GBS and other re-sequencing data for several target traits utilizing available phenotyping data
Combined analyses of genotypic and phenotypic data for discovery of marker-trait associations, and conducting GWAS
Processing, analyzing, and archiving large-scale genomic data sets, assessing data quality, conducting analyses, interpreting findings, and communicating findings to others including preparation of reports, presentations, posters and journal articles
Providing support to MSc and PhD students on topic related to its major core of research
Any other work assigned by the supervisor

The Person:

PhD in bioinformatics, genetics, computational biology preferably with 1 to 2 years of experience;
familiar with standard bioinformatics tools and scripting languages and emerging and evolving software platforms relevant to bioinformatics and computational biology;
ability to create new analytical pipelines; experience with handling large data sets;
ability to program in at least two of the following: C++, PERL, Python, R, Java.
will use next-generation sequencing technologies to generate marker data for genetic mapping and transcriptome data for expression QTL mapping, and will be responsible for data generation as well as data analysis.

Period and Remuneration: The assignment is for a period of two years, and can be extended for another year depending on performance. ICRISAT pays a very attractive all inclusive lump sum assignment fee payable in Indian Rupees.

How to Apply: Please send your application by email to icrisatjobs@cgiar.org, stating the job title (Special project Scientist-Sorghum Genomics) clearly in the subject column, addressed to the Director, Human Resources and Operations, ICRISAT, Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh 502 324, India, latest by 10 June 2014. The application should include an up-to-date Curriculum Vitae, a short statement of competencies and experience for the position, and the names and addresses (including phone/e-mail) of three referees. Only short-listed candidates will be contacted.

More at: http://www.icrisat.org/careers/Special-Project-Scientist-Sorghum-Genomics.htm

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

Arlequin: http://cmpg.unibe.ch/software/arlequin3/

BEAGLE: http://faculty.washington.edu/browning/beagle/beagle.html

fastPHASE: http://stephenslab.uchicago.edu/software.html

GENEHUNTER: http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/soft/gh/

The Genome Analysis Toolkit:

http://www.broadinstitute.org/gsa/wiki/index.php/The_Genome_Analysis_Toolkit

IMPUTE2: https://mathgen.stats.ox.ac.uk/impute/impute_v2.html

MACH: http://www.sph.umich.edu/csg/abecasis/MACH/

MERLIN: http://www.sph.umich.edu/csg/abecasis/Merlin/

PHASE: http://stephenslab.uchicago.edu/software.html

PL-EM: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~junliu/plem/

“Read-backed phasing” algorithm: http://www.broadinstitute.org/gsa/wiki/index.php/Read-backed_phasing_algorithm

SHAPE-IT: http://www.griv.org/shapeit/

Walk- in- Test cum Interview (based on test) for the selection of Research Associate

under the scheme “Distributed Information Sub Centre –DISC” & Research Assistant under scheme “Phytophthora, Fusarium and Ralstonia diseases of Horticultural and Field Crops” will be held at this Institute as per details indicated below.

WALK -IN- TEST CUM INTERVIEW

Name of the post : Research Associate

Date of Interview : 21-05-2014 at 10.00 AM

No. of posts : One

Qualifications : a)Essential

Ph.D Degree in Bioinformatics OR : Masters degree in Bioinformatics with a minimum of
60% marks or equivalent OGPA with at least two years research experience as evidenced from fellowship/ associateship/training/published papers etc.

b)Desirable: Experience in NGS data analysis.

Emoluments : Rs. 23,000/- per month + HRA (Masters Degree Holders)

Rs. 24,000/- per month + HRA (Ph.D Degree Holders)

Upper age limit : 40 years for Men & 45 years for Women as on date of Interview (Upper Age limits are relaxable for SC, ST and OBC candidates as per Govt. of India norms (at present 5 years for SC/ST and 3 years for OBC)

Duration of Project : Till 31-03-2017.

Title of Assigment : Research Assistant (on contract basis)

No. of vacancy : One

Qualification : Essential : Post Graduation in Bioinformatics and Minimum one year experience in NGS data analysis

Desirable : Experience in Perl/Python/R

Remuneration : Rs. 20,000/- per month (consolidated)

Scope of work :

1. Analysis of different file formats and their conversions.

2. Assessing the quality of data and filtering of raw reads.
3. Assembling the raw reads-de novo as well as reference mapping.
4. Compression of aligned reads using Jam tools
5. RNA-seq. Analysis
6. Differential expression testing involving Normalization, Statistical testing, heat map generation & hierarchical clustering
7. Annotating the assembled genome and geneet testing and their validation
8. Metabolic pathway analysis
9. Comparative genomics
10. Setting up of genome browsers.

Period of Assigment : Initially for six months.

Date & Venue of Interview : 21-05-2014 at IISR, Kozhikode at 10.00 AM

More at http://www.spices.res.in/pdf/disc-advtmnt.pdf

Study of 10 tools on five datasets that such a comparative evaluation of these tools is hindered by two types of circularity: they arise due to (1) the same variants or (2) different variants from the same protein occurring both in the datasets used for training and for evaluation of these tools, which may lead to overly optimistic results. Comparative evaluations of predictors that do not address these types of circularity may erroneously conclude that circularity confounded tools are most accurate among all tools, and may even outperform optimized combinations of tools.

Following tools are useful for mis sense muation detection ... 

PolyPhen‐2 (PP2)
“Predicts possible impact of an amino acid substitution on the structure and function of a human protein using straightforward physical and comparative considerations”

MutationTaster‐2 (MT2)
“Evaluation of the disease‐causing potential of DNA sequence alterations”

MutationAssessor (MASS)
“Predicts the functional impact of amino acid substitutions in proteins, such as mutations discovered in cancer or missense polymorphisms”

LRT
“Identify a subset of deleterious mutations that disrupt highly conserved amino acids within protein‐coding sequences, which are likely to be unconditionally deleterious”

SIFT
“Predicts whether an amino acid substitution affects protein function”

GERP++
“Identifies constrained elements in multiple alignments by quantifying substitution deficits. These deficits represent substitutions that would have occurred if the element were neutral DNA, but did not occur because the element has been under functional constraint. We refer to these deficits as “rejected substitutions.” Rejected substitutions are a natural measure of constraint that reflects the strength of past purifying selection on the element”

phyloP
“Compute conservation or acceleration P values based on an alignment and a model of neutral evolution”

FatHMM unweighted (FatHMM‐U)
Predicts “functional consequences of both coding variants, that is, nonsynonymous single‐nucleotide variants, and noncoding variants”

FatHMM weighted (FatHMM‐W)
Predicts “functional consequences of both coding variants, that is, nonsynonymous single‐nucleotide variants, and noncoding variants” and its weighting scheme attributes higher tolerance scores to SNVs in proteins, related proteins, or domains that already include a high fraction of pathogenic variantsh

Combined Annotation Dependent Depletion (CADD)
“CADD is a tool for scoring the deleteriousness of single‐nucleotide variants as well as insertion/deletions variants in the human genome”

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

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:18 2018] Reduction...
#file name genome size contigs heterozygous size [%] heterozygous contigs [%] identity [%] possible joins homozygous size [%] homozygous contigs [%]
/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/matplotlib/font_manager.py:273: UserWarning: Matplotlib is building the font cache using fc-list. This may take a moment.
warnings.warn('Matplotlib is building the font cache using fc-list. This may take a moment.')
test/run1/contigs.fa 163897 245 66377 40.50 221 90.20 94.854 0 97520 59.50 24 9.80

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:29 2018] Estimating parameters of libraries...
Aligning 19504 mates per library...
Insert size statistics Mates orientation stats
FastQ files read length median mean stdev FF FR RF RR
test/5000_1.fq.gz test/5000_2.fq.gz 50 4998 4990.20 721.47 0 4674 0 0
test/600_1.fq.gz test/600_2.fq.gz 100 599 598.63 47.68 0 10000 0 0

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:29 2018] Scaffolding...
iteration 1.1: test/run1/contigs.reduced.fa 24 97520 39.355 17 94157 7321 2195 0 29603
19505 pairs. 17302 passed filtering [88.71%]. 1627 in different contigs [8.34%].
1526 pairs. 558 in different contigs [36.57%].
iteration 1.2: test/run1/_sspace.1.1.fa 3 97626 39.344 3 97626 87536 6063 821 87536
19505 pairs. 17607 passed filtering [90.27%]. 182 in different contigs [0.93%].
1077 pairs. 124 in different contigs [11.51%].
iteration 2.1: test/run1/_sspace.1.2.fa 3 97626 39.344 3 97626 87536 6063 821 87536
19505 pairs. 15112 passed filtering [77.48%]. 1295 in different contigs [6.64%].
3417 pairs. 396 in different contigs [11.59%].
iteration 2.2: test/run1/_sspace.2.1.fa 1 99133 39.344 1 99133 99133 99133 2328 99133
19505 pairs. 15152 passed filtering [77.68%]. 0 in different contigs [0.00%].
3398 pairs. 0 in different contigs [0.00%].

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:34 2018] Gap closing...
iteration 1.1: test/run1/scaffolds.fa 1 99133 39.344 1 99133 99133 99133 2328 99133

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:35 2018] Final reduction...
#file name genome size contigs heterozygous size [%] heterozygous contigs [%] identity [%] possible joins homozygous size [%] homozygous contigs [%]
[WARNING] Nothing reduced!
test/run1/scaffolds.filled.fa 99390 1 0 0.00 0 0.00 0.000 0 99390 100.00 1 100.00

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:35 2018] Reporting statistics...
#fname contigs bases GC [%] contigs >1kb bases in contigs >1kb N50 N90 Ns longest
test/contigs.fa 245 163897 40.298 24 117391 3975 233 0 29603
test/run1/contigs.fa 245 163897 40.298 24 117391 3975 233 0 29603
test/run1/contigs.reduced.fa 24 97520 39.355 17 94157 7321 2195 0 29603
test/run1/_sspace.1.1.fa 3 97626 39.344 3 97626 87536 6063 821 87536
test/run1/_sspace.1.2.fa 3 97626 39.344 3 97626 87536 6063 821 87536
test/run1/_sspace.2.1.fa 1 99133 39.344 1 99133 99133 99133 2328 99133
test/run1/_sspace.2.2.fa 1 99133 39.344 1 99133 99133 99133 2328 99133
test/run1/scaffolds.fa 1 99133 39.344 1 99133 99133 99133 2328 99133
test/run1/_gapcloser.1.1.fa 1 99390 39.689 1 99390 99390 99390 2 99390
test/run1/scaffolds.filled.fa 1 99390 39.689 1 99390 99390 99390 2 99390
test/run1/scaffolds.reduced.fa 1 99390 39.689 1 99390 99390 99390 2 99390

##################################################
[Mon May 7 11:29:35 2018] Cleaning-up...
#Time elapsed: 0:00:17.376924

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