Hope everyone is having a good day.
I want to learn computational biology. I have a PhD. in pharmacology. Lots of times I heard about the computational biology/bioinformatics but never had a guideline how to learn or to start this interesting field of research.
It would be very helpful if you can guide me through this.
Have a nice day.
Dear Apu, Bioinformatics is a mean not an end in itself and the confusion of a mean with an end is the reason of the drmatic crisis science (not technology) is experiencing in these days (see for example https://www.pnas.org/content/113/34/9384.short).
Thus, first of all, you must aquire a 'quantitative sensibility' for biological problems that means: in the face of a biological problem how to restate the issue in order to have a simple recognition of which are the statistical units, the variables of interest , the most interesting scale where to look and if I can provide a suitable metrics preserving the original biological meaining.
Then the informatics will come by alone, tis means you must learn statistics (with a special emphasis on multidimensional descriptive methods like PCA, Cluster Analysis, MDS..), complex networks analysis, non-linear dynamics fundamentals (what an attractor is, what is a transition) and fundamentals of probability.
Attached you will find a sketchy representation of the quantitative needs for facing biological problems.
Dear Apu, Bioinformatics is a mean not an end in itself and the confusion of a mean with an end is the reason of the drmatic crisis science (not technology) is experiencing in these days (see for example https://www.pnas.org/content/113/34/9384.short).
Thus, first of all, you must aquire a 'quantitative sensibility' for biological problems that means: in the face of a biological problem how to restate the issue in order to have a simple recognition of which are the statistical units, the variables of interest , the most interesting scale where to look and if I can provide a suitable metrics preserving the original biological meaining.
Then the informatics will come by alone, tis means you must learn statistics (with a special emphasis on multidimensional descriptive methods like PCA, Cluster Analysis, MDS..), complex networks analysis, non-linear dynamics fundamentals (what an attractor is, what is a transition) and fundamentals of probability.
Attached you will find a sketchy representation of the quantitative needs for facing biological problems.
Dear Apu. I don't know your current standing on your bioinformatics knowledge. But assuming that you want to know bioinformatics from the very beginning, until the intermediate level, I recommend you to check this particular textbook for your reference:
https://www.amazon.com/Bioinformatics-Sequence-Analysis-David-Mount/dp/0879697121
I used it extensively during my graduate study though.
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