Galaxy Project: Online bioinformatics analysis for everyone | Hacker News Reader

Galaxy Project: Online bioinformatics analysis for everyone

galaxyproject.org

22 pointsjcr6 comments

Hope no one minds a plug here for the upcoming Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) in Dublin July 10-11, 2015 [0]. Abstract submission is now open [1].

There is also a free and open invite hackathon called the Codefest July 8-9, 2015 [2]; everyone is welcome to attend.

The BOSC 2014 conference schedule along with videos and slides from most of the talks is available [3], as are schedules and slides from previous BOSC conferences.

Many Galaxy developers and users will be there!

[0] http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/BOSC_2015

[1] http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/BOSC_Abstract_Submission

[2] http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/Codefest_2015

[3] http://www.open-bio.org/wiki/BOSC_2014_Schedule

I'm interrested in bioinformatics. I would like to know where should I begin ? Should I take learn the basic of biology before starting or should I approach it with informatic first (like rosalind appear to be)? Is this link a good starting point ?

Thanks. (I hope it's not too much off-topic)

Bioinformatics is mostly about translating and searching in big chunks of data.

You'll need to study genetics, and also some computer skills, a couple of programming languages will help a lot.

some links to taste the waters:

Perl is one of the weapons of choice to find things inside big strings of text: http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/Main_Page

Not the only tool in the city, of course: http://biopython.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://www.biolisp.org/

if you want to use lisp, you'll probably will find useful to be able to use perl regexes in lisp, several candidates here, but cl-ppcre and optima are popular

I got into bioinformatics as a sysadmin, and loved it. You are right on the money with your links, but what I would say is to first take the time to learn the general overview of genetics first. I would have been so lost managing the data I did if I hadn't taken the time to listen to all the latest lectures on genomics. I would also encourage a heavy emphasis on bacteria and the microbiome, it's largely an unexplored wilderness.

Access to a cluster of computers online is not a new thing. Bioinformatics needs powerful machines and many enterprises provide his cloud computing force for some money.

The question is always the same with this cloudy projects

what about the control of your data?

Perhaps you didn't spend very much time reading the site, but Galaxy isn't cloud only, you can host it yourself.

https://wiki.galaxyproject.org/Admin/GetGalaxy

As for the project, I am very interested in seeing how well they do file manipulation and data handling. My non-compete in the bioinformatics field is almost up, and I would love to find an open source project to latch onto and help.

Also, when it comes to bioinformatics, I would say control of data (especially in research settings) is of paramount importance, so you hit the nail on the head with that one. I don't think it will be much of an issue though, simply because the kind of data sizes you have to deal with to do good analysis is so huge that doing it on a cloud service simply isn't feasible unless you have a massively fat internet pipe to use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com