Hello Bioinformatics lovers,

I have spent the last week at EMBL, Germany attending a panel discussion about data science training in industry.

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We were asked this question: How do you ensure that what you learn does not become obsolete in 5-10 years?

For example, single-cell RNAseq technology is advancing so fast that the commands may become obsolete in 1-2 years.

Should you worry?

This is my answer.

Focus on things that do not change.

• Linux system has been around for almost 70 years. It is the same unix commands I use every day. Read this book for free https://linuxcommand.org/index.php​
• Statistics will not change. The same statistics concepts will hold for many more years to come. For example, use the binomial distribution to model count data.

btw, this is one of the best statistics books for biology: Modern Statistics for modern biology.

And I met one of the authors, Wolfgang Huber at EMBL!

• Data wrangling skills are the same. How to subset a data matrix, reshape a dataframe (from long format to wide format and vice versa), and do a PCA analysis is the same.

Whenever you have a new data type, as long as you have a solid foundation of those unchanging skills, you will always be able to learn how to analyze it.

Keep yourself up-to-date on social media and keep educating yourself with AI tools

• Follow Bioinformatics people, and journals on Twitter, Linkedin, Bluesky, and others.
• Use tools such as chatGPT and NotebookLLM to research topics and learn new analysis methods.

When you climb up the ranks in your career and do not do much hands-on analysis, it is good to gain a high-level understanding of the methods by using those AI tools.

I firmly believe it is always good to know some technical details even if you are at VP (vice president) level. Unfortunelty, many leaders talk about AI without knowing exactly what it is.

Life is a learning journey. Whenever you feel you are not learning new things, it is time to move on.

btw, This AI tool Suno ai made a song for my youtube chanel chatomics! Reply and tell me how you like it :)

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Happy Learning!

Tommy aka Crazyhottommy

PS:

If you want to learn Bioinformatics, there are three 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/​

Stay awesome!