How (and why!) are biological datasets/systems analysed?

[jaybee99]

Hi everyone. I'm someone with no training in Biology, applying for a IT post in a genomics/proteomics lab. It's a software job, not a post for a biologist, but I'm expected to demonstrate an understanding in how biological datasets and systems are analysed -- I suppose this means everything from the software that might be used, the techniques employed, the goals of the analysis in the first place. Can you tell me how and where I can research this, in a high-level way? I've got no intention of pretending to know more than I do, but I'd like to be able to answer these questions in a general way (and I know they may be too vague to be given a meaningful answer yet):

* what kind of datasets are used in genomic/proteomic research?
* what kind of relationships/patterns are researchers looking for in the data?
* what kinds of tools and forms of analysis are used to identify those results?
* what are the ways of visualising the results?

Thanks!

[JackBean]

first, you should look into some biochem/molbio book to even understand to the basics of the life. Second, you should look for some book or course or whatever covering bioinformatics, because your questions are too wide and can be answered in several ways dependent on what is purpose of your analysis.

[jaybee99]

Thanks for your reply. Yes, sorry for the hopelessly vague questions...I was given a pointer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics which looks like a helpful starting point.

[JackBean]

well, not ideal, but if you do not have anything better...

[jaybee99]

I may not have made it clear that I was looking for an introduction suitable for a layperson. In the end I got quite a wide variety of links by asking here: http://www.reddit.com/r/biology/comment ... tssystems/

[JackBean]

sorry, but those links are little bit useless, if you know nothing about the bioinformatics (like the page on Wiki about interactomics ), you need to start from the beginning, not reading manuals of complete tools. Also, as I already said, if you do not know biology/biochemistry/molecular biology, how do you want to do BIOinformatics?

[jaybee99]

I'm well aware that If I wanted "do" Bioinformatics, I would have a long road ahead of me, and I'd probably start out by undertaking a Batchelors degree in a related discipline, rather than asking questions on the web. Like I said, I'm applying for a job in IT. If they were looking for a bioinformatician, I wouldn't waste my time applying. I'm a software engineer, and I wanted to find out something, in general terms, about their field.

[JackBean]

I'm not telling you to study bioinformatics, but if you're supposed to do something related to biology, you should understand what and WHY are you doing that. And just by being expert in IT you won't be able to uncover all the tricks and problems.
Anyway, you should rather start with some general bioinformatics rather then tools' how-to

[jaybee99]

As you can see, the responses I got included links to open courseware and several introductory summaries. They were quite a bit more helpful than your suggestion that I "look for some book or course". Thanks for the input.

[JackBean]

if you think so... but you didn't provide any information like where you from...