Hi! I'm Tommy Tang
I am a bioinformatician/computational biologist with six years of wet lab experience and over 12 years of computation experience. I will help you to learn computational skills to tame astronomical data and derive insights. Check out the resources I offer below and sign up for my newsletter!
How to upskill your bioinformatics skills
Hello Bioinformatics lovers and new subscribers, Tommy here. How was your week? It was a busy week for me. I first attended the FoG (Festival of Genomics) conference in Boston and co-taught a bioinformatics upskilling workshop with Dean Lee. We had a full room of people! If you want to follow a practical guide to upskill your bioinformatics skills, read the PDF here. I then gave a talk on "Good Enough Practices for Reproducible Bioinformatics Analysis" at Moderna. Read the PDF here. The...
Your CRISPR Hit Isn’t a Cancer Drug (Yet)—Here’s Why
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Tommy here. Recursion, the AI star company, recently laid off 20% of its people. It is a humble reminder that Drug discovery is hard. Biology is more complicated than many thought. AI drug companies that do not have deep domain biology knowledge will inevitably fail. Today's newsletter is a simple example: Why Your CRISPR Screen Hit Might Be a TrapFrom bioinformatics insight to therapeutic reality. You ran a CRISPR screen. You found top hits that kill cancer...
How Sample Naming Wastes Millions—and What Bioinformatics Can Do About It
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Tommy here. I was interviewed yesterday by Nature yesterday, about best practices using spreadsheets and naming files. P.S.: This is a must read for any scientists (both wet and dry) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2017.1375989 It turns out to be a big problem for bioinformaticians. How many hours do bioinformaticians lose matching sample IDs across assays?Too many.And every one of them is avoidable. Let’s talk about why this keeps...
New post from chatomics! How to calculate partial correlation controlling cancer types
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, I enabled my blog https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/#posts RSS feed. So whenever I have a new blog post, it will be sent to your email (after I edit it). This is different from my weekly Saturday newsletter. My blog posts are mostly technical tutorials. This is new update from my blog: How to calculate partial correlation controlling cancer types Published on May 22, 2025 To not miss a post like this, sign up for my newsletter to learn computational...
Your sequencing failed? Maybe you're studying bacteria, not human.
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, After 13 years of analyzing sequencing data, I am an "expert" in doing it. I gained those experiences not because I am smarter, but simply because I made more mistakes and I have encountered more problems. Today, I will talk about: The Hidden Enemy in Your Cell Line: Mycoplasma Contamination Have a cell line with poor sequencing results? Low mapping rates? Before you blame the aligner, stop. You might be sequencing bacteria instead of human. 1. The Dirty Secret of...
“Can you make a figure for my talk tomorrow?” — Why bioinformaticians lose sleep (and sanity)
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, I am eager to send you my weekly newsletter because I can not wait to see you smile. Of course, I can not see your smile, but I can imagine... I hope the little nuggets make you feel heard and learn something useful. Today, we will talk about this dreadful situation we all face: Can you make a figure for my talk tomorrow?” — A Day in the Life of a Bioinformatician If you’ve ever worked with wet lab collaborators, this line will sound familiar: “I have a...
Feel like you're falling behind in bioinformatics? Read this.
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Tommy here. It is a long weekend here in the US. Make sure you take a break and do some activities with your family. Below is something I feel myself too. We all get overwhelmed If you've ever felt overwhelmed in bioinformatics—like you're constantly behind, like everyone else is ahead—you’re not alone. Let me show you why that feeling isn’t failure.It’s the nature of the field. In 2012, I started learning bioinformatics.Back then, ChIP-seq was the shiny new...
New post from chatomics! Multi-Omics Integration Strategy and Deep Diving into MOFA2
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, I enabled my blog https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/#posts RSS feed. So whenever I have a new blog post, it will be sent to your email. This is different from my weekly Saturday newsletter. My blog posts are mostly technical tutorials. This is new update from my blog: Multi-Omics Integration Strategy and Deep Diving into MOFA2 Published on May 17, 2025 Today’s guest blog post on multiOmics integration is written by Aditi Qamra and edited by Tommy. Aditi is...
The Biologist Who Uses AI Will Replace You
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Tommy here. It was Mother's Day last weekend. Did you call her? I did, and I do it every week for > 1 hour. I wrote a post about it here. Just be a listener I am not going to teach you how to be a good son or daughter today:) I am going to talk about Bioinformatics! Let’s get one thing clear: AI won’t replace you. But a biologist using AI? They absolutely will. Especially in bioinformatics—where the questions never stop coming. Back in 2013, when I got stuck on...
The Script They Wouldn’t Share—and Why I Never Forgot It
Hello Bioinformatics lovers, Tommy here. I thought Boston skipped Spring and ran into Summer last week. It suddenly became chilly again this week.. It is already May! But nothing is colder than "You figure it out yourself" when.. That hurts! I asked a senior labmate for help when I started bioinformatics.They refused to share their script. Like it was gold.That stung. I was new. Drowning in FASTQ files. Bash was foreign. They had the solution. But all I got was: “Figure it out yourself.” That...
I am a bioinformatician/computational biologist with six years of wet lab experience and over 12 years of computation experience. I will help you to learn computational skills to tame astronomical data and derive insights. Check out the resources I offer below and sign up for my newsletter!