My First Step towards Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics is a rising area which combines multiple discipline including Biology, Computer Science, Psychology, Mathematics and Statistics, Chemistry.
Last time I read Biology was in my high school. I was quite good and a topper of the class. Despite of having keen interest in Biological Science that time, I chose Computer Science as my undergrad major to satisfy my intense interest. We did not have graduation degree on Bioinformatics in our country. To be frank, I did not plan to move to Bioinformatics in my undergrad life as well. My target was to learn as much knowledge as possible in the diverse area of Computer Science. When I was exposed to AI, Machine Learning I decided to do MS in this topic. As a consequence, I decided to do major in Intelligent System in my MS. During MS I started to develop an interest in Bioinformatics.
Since there were no courses related to Biological Science or Bioinformatics directly, I started to read on my own. I started with Human Cognition and development of AI cognition. TV series Westworld encouraged me in this particular case. Eventually, I searched a lot of content on google. Among them, there was a list of Cognitive AI projects on Wikipedia. Additionally, it contains other interesting projects in AI. Among the projects, OpenCog interested me. It seemed a nice framework designed to develop AI systems.
One day I was reading some articles on attributes which define and control human psychology. I tried to understand functionality of hormones like Estrogen, Testosterone, Serotonin and so on which are responsible for various activities in our body and mind how various hormones are controlled by our Endocrine System. During that time, I found some competitions on Kaggle which required to solve the problems related to various type of Cancer by the help of machine learning and neural network problem. I was not well equipped with the knowledge required to solve those problems. I knew ML and NN algos but I felt that if I know more about those problem, it may allow me to discover more interesting research problem that exists in the current world.
Following my curious mind, I have started digging about cancer and cancer mutation. I have started reading about our primal components like DNA, RNA and proteins. I am trying to understand how mutation works and when it fails, how cancer cell affects normal mutation. I will try to write a separate article regarding cancer genomics in future and some interesting aspect that fascinated me including the resources that helped me.