5 Things any Bioinformatician should know

5 Things any Bioinformatician should know

1- How to work with a computer: And i mean by that, how to work with at least one operating system like Windows for example, most of bioinformatics students and researchers like Linux because its open source and all of its softwares are free, but i tell you that Windows is not bad at all for Bioinformatics, because most softwares designed for linux are availible for Windows too.

2- How to use internet browsers: This is indispensable because the internet is what made Bioinformatics move so fast, so if you want to be a bioinformatician, you have to know how to work with internet browsers like (internet explorer, netscape, chrome, firefox), i personally prefer Firefox, i find it very easy and powerful.

3- How to install a new software: you should have this easy knowledge, because installing a Windows based software is a peace of cake comparing to Linux based one.

4- A little knowledge of Molecular Biology: You can't be a Bioinformatician without having a litlle knowledge in Biology especially Molecular Biology and genetics, it will be like you want to play guitar and you don't know what is a guitar...!

5- How to surf the internet: This is very important as most of bioinformatics operations are made online, so you have to know how to open a website, surf it, download from it...etc

The most important knowledge that you should have about the How to surf the internet, is how to use Search Engines, because they will provide you with anything you will need.

These are the basic skills that any Bioinformatics student should have.

For more suggestions about this, please comment.

List of the most popular and useful Databases in Bioinformatics

List of the most popular and useful Databases in Bioinformatics

As Biological data is growing every day, maintaining this huge amount of data has became hard, so i'll give you what i call the best organized and maintained bioinformatics databases.

Genbank on NCBI : this database is the most powerful in bioinformatics because its designed for every thing : proteins genes genomes, structures, ………etc.
To visit NCBI click HERE.

Swissprot: if your query is a protein sequence i advise you to use SwissProt that is located on the expasy proteomics server, in addition you'll find dozens of useful programs that you can use to analyze your sequence.
To visit swissprot or the expasy proteomics server click HERE.

Integrated Microbial Genomes: this database is for complete genomes, i like it because its very organized and anyone can get used to it in a few minutes
To visit the Integrated Microbial Genomes click HERE.

TIGR: The Institute for Genomic Research founded by Craig Venter is a project for complete bacterial genomes, if you are a microbiologist, then this database is exactly for you, in addition to the database, bioinformaticiens working in the TIGR project had developped a set of very useful tools to analyses the database genomes such as : GLIMMER, MUMer...etc.
To visit TIGR project click HERE.

Enssembl: for me its the best database for complete genomes because it containes a lot of graphic tools for interpreting and analyzing data, that means that you don't get boared while exploring it,all is visual!!!.
To visit Enssembl click HERE.

There are more databases and project on the internet, but i found these databases very helpful in my reasearch.

If you have more useful databases or projects you can post it in the comment section.