I planned to make research on bioinformatics, but don't know where to start. Somehow I read some books, and I also want suggestions from others what good topic to be considered in my paper.
Hi Russel,
The field of Bioinformatics spans from a single cell to systems and beyond. Reaserach in Bioinformatics covers a vast variety of biological research, from single cell genomics to phylogenetics, from single gene isoforms to whole genomes, a single gene to gene networks, a single cell to a whole biological system and even across systems, a simple program to full complex packages/softwares/pipelines and so on. You have a biological question/hypothesis that you want to answer/test, there are bioinformatics approaches, methods and techniques available that can be applied to give you insights into finding answer/testing that question/hypothesis. Each and every bioinformatics approach will involve a statistical method at some point of time, the complexity of the method will differ accroding to the question being investigated.
Unless your aim is to do research on "Bioinformatics" as a field itself, the list of topics will be so huge that selecting one/ few good topic out of those will itself be a project on its own. Reading a couple of books will not help you either. So what I would suggest you to do is first select a broad area of biological research of your interest and then keep narrowing down with in that field to one/few specifc questions/hypotheses. Discuss those topics with your guide and come to an agreement. Then find out which bioinformatics approaches/methods you can use. Please select area of research based on your skill set and knowledge of bioinformatics, since high level of understanding of different concepts and programming skills are required for bioinformatics research.
If your aim is to do research on "Bioinformatics" as a field then I believe the standard topics of market research should be one of the topics you can further discuss with your supervisior/guide.
Regards,
Inder
Hi Russell,
Bioinformatics basically can be broadly divided into -- an analyses domain and a developer domain. So first you need to decide whether you want to do bioinformatics analyses (Sequence Analyses, Modelling, Drug Design etc) or Bioinformatics Development (Algorithms, Software and Systems Biology). Then you can try to pinpoint or identify a research problem. And like the other contributors have mentioned you have to keep yourself up to date with the developments in the field.
Hope this helps
Best
Sayak
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