Building an Immersive Bioinformatics Experience for Biologists, Clinicians and other Non-Bioinformaticians
More and more research is driven by data, especially high resolution molecular data. This genomic, transcriptomic and other “omics” data is sometimes referred to as simply “omics”. Knowing how to handle omics data, as well as understanding the intricacies of how it was generated, is key to understanding it’s meaning. That “meaning” is defined by phenotypes and biological context that is needed to interpret statistical associations afforded by computer algorithms. So what is more important? The biological context, clinical applications, computer science or statistics? Seems like it’s all related and critical!
Bioinformatics is a tough sell sometimes: while computer scientists are hesitant to dig deep into the molecular terminology, biologists and clinicians often loose interest seeing the first lines of code. So it’s easy to ask the other person to do some bioinformatics magic or for the computer scientist to jusk worry about input and output in the code. But how much is lost by “outsourcing”? How much time is spent explaining, how much information is lost by having to explain? A lot of energy and time can be spent on establishing the infrastructure and building relationships to make progress in blending statistics, computer science and biology to make some sense of research data.
This is why we decided that an immersive experience can be very helpful to get people started with analysis of real life project data. There are plently of courses in coding and materials giving a good overview of “how genes work”, but most project-based, multi-omics series of courses (or workshops) are hard to find.
Especially now, we can see that personalized medicine and interest in precision therapeutics development, omics data can be transformational. A whole workforce with the right skills needs to be ready for this change that is already taking place.
Our goal is to give practical experience, basic skills, but most importantly the logic and appreciation for the role of big data analysis and multi-omics in practical applications. The way these courses are structured, theory and practice is intermixed and all the project data has been adapted to run on our T-Bio platform, a visual interface that eliminates the need for coding.We hope that this immersive experience will help anyone jump into real data analysis projects and not scare away either group.
You can take a look at what we’ve done so far here: edu.t-bio.info
We are continuing to work on the content, hoping to collaborate with educators on selecting projects that make this experience meaningful and effective. Bioinformatics itself is somewhat a new concept, sometimes under appreciated and difficult to grasp in practical terms. If you are interested in this concept, please do not hesitate to let me know: elia@pine.bio
