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Comment by goldfeld | Hacker News Reader

I have been wanting to get into bioinformatics, but there's something I miss coming from webdev: the ability to create something over a few weeks. I don't mean I want to discover something new, and I'm not sure I'd want to get into research at all. I wanted to be able to experiment and see stuff show up on a screen related to the structures and formulas I'm learning. Some fun and practical, even if not very useful (games?), project I can tackle while learning bioinformatics. Is there such a thing?

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Rosalind [1] (previously posted on HN) is pretty good for something like a Project Euler for bioinformatics. The problems are pretty similar to the introductory computational biology course at my school for upper-year undergrads and first-year grad students.

It's a really good way to get a good overview of the field, and what some of the problems have been already solved in bioinformatics. It's definitely best to combine it with a more traditional textbook such as "Introduction to Computational Biology" (Haubold and Wiehe) or "Biological Sequence Analysis" (Mitchison, Krogh, Durbin, and Eddy).

Hope that helps!

[1]: http://rosalind.info/

That is absolutely fantastic! Kudos to UCSD and Saint Petersburg Academic University for creating such an awesome educational resource! And thank you for pointing me to it!

+1 for this.

Rosalind is a great way of improving your knowledge of biology and CS. It is quite cool to see computer science and mathematics problems and techniques applied to bioinformatics.

Rosalind [1] (previously posted on HN) is pretty good for something like a Project Euler for bioinformatics

I think I have a new hobby!

If all you want to do is play around with molecules on a screen, check out PyMol.

But here's the rub: if you want to learn "bioinformatics", you're going to have to accept that most of the work is inherently not visual. I worked in about the most shiny, graphical part of biology possible (protein structure), and maybe only 20% of the work involved spinning molecules on a screen.

The real work of bioinformatics involves thinking very hard about problems that are deeply mathematical. The visualization part is strictly secondary -- though it gets the most attention, for obvious reasons.

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