Welcome to Santrupti's world! In my blog, you will find some interesting things about Algorithms and data structures and their use in the field of biology. Yes! You heard it right. Welcome to Bioinformatics.
Why Bioinformatics ?
I took bioinformatics course out of curiosity to try out something other than programming. Did you know that a single cell stores a huge amount of data that defines a person? Quite perplexing right! Well this is how important DNA can be. Working with a biologist, I learnt about the humongous amounts of data generated by sequencing. Mining this data and analyzing it is a highly complex problem to solve. It requires an intelligent software that can effectively manage the memory and processing power. Even with this, it takes hours and some times days for the program to generate the required analysis. Now this is where my strengths come in handy. I have been involved in programming in C for quite some time now. I have played with other programming languages like C++, Java, C# and Perl during my undergraduate days. Bioinformatics is one course where you get to learn computer science, statistics and biology, a rare combination!
So what is it that I want to do?
Looking at the real challenges in bioinformatics, the one that prods me the most is integrating the data generated and developing models of complex systems. Basically, simulation modelling and prediction. Prediction of ? The susceptibility of a baby just born, to a particular disease in the future. Well, that's the goal. But as an amateur computer scientist and a bioinformatician, I want to make prediction of proteins and other important sites in a gene, so as to further the research of fellow biologists. Hopefully we will be able to find cures to some of the chronic diseases we face today.
Your specialty is interesting. My undergrad thesis was about bioinformatic as well. It's really interesting to observe how DNA simulate and behave. Wish you luck with your career path :)
ReplyDeleteYour introduction about bioinformatics is very interesting and attractive. From your article, I find that to be a bioinformatician is great because first you have the opportunity to learn interdisciplinary courses which include statistics, computer science and biology, which is awesome; second the problems you expect to resolve are closely related with human health, which will improve life quality of people.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, there is one statistical course named bioinformatics. Not sure whether you know that. Maybe we can discuss it face to face if you are interested in it. I believe there will be many overlaps between our interests since one of most quickly growing big data source is from bioinformatics, such as DNA sequencing data.