Career path in Bioinformatics
When people refer to the field of bioinformatics, they’re usually referring to two overlapping areas. The first is what you would call “bioinformatics”, which is more technical, and examples are creating tools to analyse data for biologists, or specific databases to store and retrieve information. For example if you created a new tool that could analyse microarray data in a way that hasn’t been done previously, then this is bioinformatics. Many journals such as Nature and Bioinformatics, have sections purely for articles about new methods and tools.
The second path is what you might call “computational biology”, which is all about doing biological research, using a computer instead of a pipette. A strong understanding of biology is important, as well as the ability to phrase, then answer a research question. For example, if you believed that duplicate genes were less well conserved compared with non duplicates, and you tested this hypothesis across a set of genomes, then this would be computational biology.
These two fields are not distinct, and overlap a fair amount. Some universities have bioinformatics departments in both the computer science and life science faculties, indicating the type of research carried out in each.
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