Hello Bioinformatics lovers,

Christmas is at the corner. Are you starting to decorate your home?

It is a perfect time to reflect on your 2024 and ask good questions about what you want to achieve in 2025.

Today, I will lay out my framework for learning bioinformatics or any skills in life.

Step 1: Documentation

Read books, take courses, and ferociously take notes.

See here for a list of books and courses I recommend https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/post/my-opinionated-selection-of-books-for-bioinformatics-data-science-curriculum/​

You have to have a high-level understanding of the topics first.

Step 2: Demonstration

You try to follow EXACTLY the same examples in the book/courses and code it up to understand.

For example, if you are learning unix commands, type the same command in your terminal and try to understand

the output.

A great tool I found is this https://sandbox.bio/ for Interactive bioinformatics tutorials. Robert and Maria from OMGenomics built it.

I highly recommend you their youtube channel.

They recently reviewed 10 CVs for bioinformatics job applicants and I am sure you will get some insights.

Together, you can watch my tips to build a strong bioinformatics CV.​

Step3: Replication

Now that you have mastered some basic skills and you can follow the tutorials, it is time to do some real work.

Find a genomics paper with downloadable data and reproduce the computational figures in the paper.

Apply the skills you learned to a real-life projects for your research.

The examples in the books are always easy to follow, but the real-life data are messier and you will have a lot of troubles.

That's a feature not a bug!

It is only through trials and errors that you gain deeper experience.

During the Christmas holidays, I will write an end to end tutorial to replicate figures in a paper with RNAseq data and ChIP-seq data and share them with you for free.

Why am I doing this? watch this 5 mins video on why I am sharing bioinformatics tips and tutorials.

Forward this newsletter to your friends if you find it helpful. As I said in my video: Sharing is caring :)

Summary

Documenting, deonstrating and replicating are the three steps to learn bioinformatics and any skills in life.

Life is a never-ending learning process. That's what makes it interesting.

No? think about how boring it will be if you do not learn something new.

Happy Learning!

Tommy

PS:

If you want to learn Bioinformatics, there are other 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!