Hello Bioinformatics lovers,

Holidays are here! I hope you get some rest and recharge during the break!

How can one become a great bioinformatician?

I know many of you are beginners. If you want to know how to start, please read this blog post:

​My opinionated selection of books/urls for bioinformatics/data science curriculum.​

In summary, you need to learn Unix commands and R/python languages.

Those are the basic skills you need to have first.

But let's suppose you already know the basics, what's next?

I find that reproducing figures from a paper helps (I have said it many times!).

Download a dataset from GEO and start reproducing a figure from a publication!

Take this publication as an example https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6186417/​

Can you reproduce this figure? (the data is at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE66083)

If you are interested, I can create an end-to-end tutorial for it. Let me know!

Some final thoughts:

1. keep an open mind. There is always something new for you to learn: a new tool or a new paper. Always keep learning.
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2. compare with yourself and not others. As long as you are better than yesterday, you should be proud of yourself. we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in 1 year but underestimate how much we can in 10 years!
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3. AI is taking over the world. Now we can create scripts with AI easily. You still need the basic knowledge to judge if they are right or not. So you can not skip step 0: knowing all the basics.
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4. always sharpen your deep biology domain knowledge. Knowing how to frame the right questions to ask is more important. I found a greater bioinformatician always has deeper biology knowledge.

Happy Learning!

Tommy aka, crazyhottommy

PS. I created a video on creating upset plot to visualize gene sets.

check it out here.

PPS:

If you want to learn Bioinformatics, there are ways that I can help:

1. My free YouTube Chatomics channel, make sure you subscribe to it.
2. I have many resources collected on my github here.
3. I have been writing blog posts for over 10 years https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/​

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Stay awesome!