Bioinformatics Data Skills

Chapter 1. How to Learn Bioinformatics

Right now, in labs across the world, machines are sequencing the genomes of the life on earth. Even with rapidly decreasing costs and huge technological advancements in genome sequencing, we’re only seeing a glimpse of the biological information contained in every cell, tissue, organism, and ecosystem. However, the smidgen of total biological information we’re gathering amounts to mountains of data biologists need to work with. At no other point in human history has our ability to understand life’s complexities been so dependent on our skills to work with and analyze data.

This book is about learning bioinformatics through developing data skills. In this chapter, we’ll see what data skills are, and why learning data skills is the best way to learn bioinformatics. We’ll also look at what robust and reproducible research entails.

Why Bioinformatics? Biology’s Growing Data

Bioinformaticians are concerned with deriving biological understanding from large amounts of data with specialized skills and tools. Early in biology’s history, the datasets were small and manageable. Most biologists could analyze their own data after taking a statistics course, using Microsoft Excel on a personal desktop computer. However, this is all rapidly changing. Large sequencing datasets are widespread, and will only become more common in the future. Analyzing this data takes different tools, new skills, and many computers with large amounts of memory, processing ...