Wednesday 19 May 2010

Has NGS changed the roles of Bioinformaticians?

Writing in Nature, Kelly Rae Chi examines the changing landscape of genome sequencing, and what it means for related careers.
 an abstract can be read here

Going forward, bioinformaticians will likely take on "layered roles," she writes, in which they bring to the sequencing center their software engineering, database administration, and mathematics skills, among other things. Because bionformaticians are critical in the interpretation of data, Jim Mulkin, acting director of the National Institutes of Health's Intramural Sequencing Center, tells Nature that "almost every lab now needs to have a bioinformatician on their team."


With the exception of the last line, I hardly think that anything changed. Or perhaps its just in my region. And I beg to differ that every lab needs a bioinformatician.
You can
1) collaborate with others
2) outsource the bioinformatics
Hiring a bioinformatician that knows his/her stuff is not easy. My experience is that most times you need a couple of months before the new staff is settled down enough to churn or munge data without supervision.

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Datanami, Woe be me