Sequencing genomes to track pathogens: Harry Potter and Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics sits at the crossroads of Biology and Computer Science. It’s a fantastic career for people who are interested in Biology but also enjoy programming or solving tricky problems. In this article, a software engineer working on sequencing pathogen genomes describes what it is like to work in this field.

My job is to analyse the genomes of bacteria so that we can tell if someone has a particularly nasty one and to help us work out where they got it from.

I do that by looking at their genomes. A genome is like the instruction manual for a cell. Your cells got theirs from your parents. The instructions tell your cells how to make useful molecules to maintain themselves, make copies, and to fight off attacks (among other things).

You can write out the instructions in a genome using the letters ACGT. Most bacteria have 1–10 million letters in their genome which is almost exactly the same length as the combined Harry Potter series. My job is to read the entire series for one bacteria and then compare it with the same length of text in another bacteria. Obviously, I do this using a computer.

Some bits of a genome are more important than others. These are the genes, which you can think of like the characters in Harry Potter. Sometimes there are small mutations to these genes, which are the sorts of things we’re hoping to spot.

You’ve got loads of bacteria in you right now and most of them are probably doing you good. It’s when some of the genes (characters) change that we might get ill. Often the changes are small and don’t matter; it wouldn’t be as interesting if Ron was blond but it wouldn’t hurt the story much. Sometimes the changes are a bit bigger, especially if the bacteria got given a gene by another bacteria.

For example, what if Darth Vader from Star Wars was enrolled instead of Hermione and became Harry’s best childhood friend. I’m not sure what would happen but it probably wouldn’t be good.

My job is to search for genes and mutations which could cause problems (like Vader) and work out what they mean. Sometimes it might mean that you get really ill; sometimes it might be that an antibiotic won’t be effective for you.

Bioinformatics is a great career if you like computers or biology (or both but you can learn the other). I like it because it’s really hard to do well (genomes are massive) but really important. It’s one of the best careers for computer people to make the world a slightly better place.

This article was written by Ben Taylor, a software engineer at the Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance.

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