We have prepared a catalog of resources explaining how to start research in bioinformatics. It includes educational materials, example bioinformatics code, example data sets, cloud-based resources, and an interface to access interesting and potentially important data sets

Get started

• Choose intensive tutorials or online class to get the background in bioinformatics from the catalog
• Familiarize yourself with bioinformatics code to process the omics data. Examples of the code and scripts are available here
• Choose the problem are would like to work on from the catalog. Problems are ranked based on the amount of knowledge required to understand the problem from biological or computer science point of view
• Download the publically available omics data. The list of the important and interesting omics ting datasets is provided here
• Apply the obtained knowledge and skills and develop a new bioinformatics method or perform novel analysis

Educational resources

• UNIX for bioinformatics (9 hours) NIBLSE publication
• Collection of hands-on workshops to learn omics data analysis, programming and statistical techniques (9 hours each) resource
• How to involve undergraduates in bioinformatics research resource publication
• Bioinformatics Specialization at Coursera resource
• Algorithms and Data Structures MicroMaster Program at edX: https://www.edx.org/micromasters/ucsandiegox-algorithms-and-data-structures
• Biology Meets Programming: Bioinformatics for Beginners MOOC at Coursera https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics
• Introduction to Genomic Data Science adaptive MOOC at edX https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-genomic-data-science-uc-san-diegox-cse181-1x
• Analyze Your Genome! MOOC at edX: https://www.edx.org/course/analyze-your-genome
• Algorithms for DNA sequencing, https://www.coursera.org/learn/dna-sequencing
• Algorithms and data structures used in Computational Genomics, http://www.langmead-lab.org/teaching-materials/

Example bioinformatics code

Example of bionformatics programs and scripts are here

Example of interesting and potentially important data sets

• Metagenomics data across various human tissues data browser
• Human WGS and WES sequencing across more than 2000 individuals data browser

Available computational resources

The Training Infrastructure as a Service (TIaaS) (https://galaxyproject.eu/tiaas) offers opportunities for educational institutions to train researchers basic principles and applications used in bioinformatics using virtual machines (VM) on the Galaxy platform. TIaaS could be supplemented by additional platform-independent modules that would support flexible, remote training of researchers in modern analytical research projects.

List of novice-friendly reviews or resourses on bioinformstics

• A primer for non-bioinformaticians on RNA-Seq analysis. Overview of the current methods and strategies (in preparation)

List of important bioinformatics problems

We have classified the bioinformatics problems based on the computational and/or biological knowledge required to understand the problem. The catalog of problems is available here

We are working to improve the catalog. New resources or paper can be added by Issues interface using this link (use New Issue button): https://github.com/smangul1/online.bioinformatics/issues

(C) Prepared by Serghei Mangul, Lana Martin,Ben Langmead, Javier Sanchez Galan, Ian Toma, Fereydoun Hormozdiari, Pavel Pevzner, Eleazar Eskin 2018