• Question: What is a bioinformatician?

    Asked by milton24601 to Chris on 11 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by tanglewood12.
    • Photo: Chris Cole

      Chris Cole answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      A good question.

      A bioinformatician is a scientist who combines biology and computing (also known as informatics) – hence ‘bio’ – ‘informatics’. In practice this means bioinformaticians use computer skills (programming, statistics, data analysis, etc) to work on biological information (i.e. results produced from one or more experiments). This means that with bioinformatics you can much more complex and detailed analysis of the biological experiment than a human could do.

      For example, it is quite common now to study what every single gene is doing in a cell during an experiment – that’s over 20,000 observations at the same time! There’s no way a human could do all that by themselves. With a computer you study them all together and see which ones are doing wierd or interesting things.

Comments

  • Photo: drbnorris

    drbnorris commented on :

    Can you tell us more about how maths contributes to the research you are doing?

  • Photo: Chris

    Chris commented on :

    The majority of the maths I use is based around statistics. Mean, median and standard deviation.

    We look for differences between conditions and we need to know whether those differences are statistically significant.

    Other people do much more complex things like solving differential equations, but it just depends on the type of experiment you’re working on.