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Showing posts from March, 2019

Views of a pet bioinformatician

My research group has three bioinformaticians, but the team is mostly wet lab focused. So I consider myself and my colleagues as pet bioinformaticians . I could also be considered a clinical bioinformatician , and I want to share my (little) experience so far: Communication My lab is mostly wet lab but my boss has several bioinformaticians, despite not understanding much the mathematical/technical aspect of what we do. She is mostly interested in which genes are up-regulated, or which microorganisms are involved in the disease (inflammatory bowel disease). It is often difficult to explain my concerns with using some methods. For instance, she wants to know which microorganisms are related to which genes from the mucosal intestine. She frequently asks me for the correlations between them, without considering that this way we might have lots of noise from different sources like the diet that different patients follow. At the same time I also need to make is easy to understand the m