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Supportive Courses for Bioinformatics?

Posted by Cliff on from the learning-from-others-experiences dept.

Per Christian Henden asks: "I`m aiming for a masters degree in bioinformatics, and I`m uncertain which courses would be good to follow (and my counselor doesn't know, either). There are of course some courses that 'belong' to this degree, and I`ll take those, but I get to choose a number of additional courses. I want to ask people working in bioinformatics 'What (CS) subjects are important or especially useful in bioinformatics?' I`m planning on choosing 'Large Datasets', 'Parallel Programming', 'Image Classification', and 'Subsymbolic AI', because I think those are important, but I`m really not sure what is useful or not in real life bioinformatics." Other Ask Slashdot articles, which have touched on bioinformatics, have dealt with magazines, books and graduate schools.

4 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. BioInformatics for Dummies... by PHAEDRU5 · · Score: 2, Informative

    subject line says it all.

    No, seriously, this is a good book.

    --
    668: Neighbour of the Beast
  2. Take more stats than I did! by h3 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Depending on exactly which area of bioinformatics you're looking to get into, statistics may be an important aspect and is often overlooked. Not just your basic stats 101, but understanding what hidden Markov models, Monte Carlo simulations, and Bayesian analysis are good for.

    I didn't take enough stats and have no real good grasp of the above :p.

    -h3

  3. Life Sciences and Statistics by pvera · · Score: 2, Informative

    I work for a market research firm that focuses exclusively on the bioinformatics market. With a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering I am the worst educated employee of the company if you don't count the President/co-owner with his bachelor's in history.

    The main problem we have is that all our employees, regardless of field, need a strong scientific education (there's only 15 people and the company is profitable, so there is a lot of cross-utilization). Even the marketing folks come from a lab background, so they understand what is going on. I am their resident IT geek and in the last year I have been forced to absorb more about biology tools and techniques that I would have even dreamed of, and that's without even trying.

    --
    Pedro
    ----
    The Insomniac Coder
  4. Computational biology by arn0n · · Score: 2, Informative
    I'm studying for a MSc in computational biology myself, and I've found that the most useful courses would be statistics-related, i.e. parametric & non-parameteric analysis, information theory, etc. It may be boring (it IS boring, dammit!), but you have to know how to do it.
    Not knowing how to assess significance of your results can cause you a lot of grief, either if you miss important results, or assign importance to non-signifcant results.

    In the second tier, it is crucial to have a good grasp of the biology itself - and here it highly depends on what you're researching. If you deal with genetics, molecular biology is critical; the more the better.

    Also, take some machine-learning courses if you can (those that deal with classifications).

    The software-writing part in computational biology is less important, and as long as you feel comfortable in whatever programming language, it'll probably do. The difficult part is knowing WHAT to program, which data to use, and figuring how to extract significance out of it.