A beginner's guide to bioinformatics - part I

“What topics should I study to learn bioinformatics?” – I often get asked this question by biology students and sometimes even biology professors. The answer depends on what you want to do, but how would someone, who is new to using computers for biology, know what can be done? To add to our difficulties, technology is changing so rapidly that even experts do not know what software tools will remain useful next year.

Keeping the above complications in mind, I created a general framework to describe one’s abilities in bioinformatics that should be valid even with changing technologies. Another reason for creating this framework is to fit our new posts into one or other category for easy description.

From a top level, I prefer to divide the levels of expertise in bioinformatics into five layers with 5 being the most difficult.

Layer 1 – Using web to analyze biological data
Layer 2 – Ability to install and run new programs
Layer 3 – Writing own scripts for analysis in PERL, python or R
Layer 4 – High level coding in C/C++/Java for implementing existing algorithms or modifying existing codes for new functionality
Layer 5 – Thinking mathematically, developing own algorithms and implementing in C/C++/Java

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