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Ask HN: Best way to learn computational biology/immunology?

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Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn computational biology/immunology?

#11

Computational biology is a pretty broad term. Usually things that have to do with computers & biology are bioinformatics or computational biology. Briefly, for bioinformatics you’d need things like C++ under your belt and interest to come up with ways to make things work really fast and optimal on huge sequencing datasets. Comp bio is a super fun field to be in. For me it's mostly using computers to do biology. But i…

Specifically about immunology, I'm not so sure - I study cancer but most my grad companions in comp immunology use similar techniques as me. But there might be very domain specific immunology techniques that I'm not aware of. Regardless of the "shared" technique though, you need a lot of domain knowledge to interpret your results.

But as broad advice:

If you know a broad technique you're interested in, see which immunology lab does that and go from there.

If you already know the types of immunology questions you wanna go after, find the lab that studies that question, then see which techniques they use and learn those.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn computational biology/immunology?

#12

Computational biology is a pretty broad term. Usually things that have to do with computers & biology are bioinformatics or computational biology. Briefly, for bioinformatics you’d need things like C++ under your belt and interest to come up with ways to make things work really fast and optimal on huge sequencing datasets. Comp bio is a super fun field to be in. For me it's mostly using computers to do biology. But i…

sorry for 2 I meant basic biology knowledge lol

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn computational biology/immunology?

#13
I think the main question need to answer for yourself is whether you're more interested in biology or programming, ie do you want to use software tools to do biology (computational biology), or do you want to make the tools that others use (bioinformatics)?

If biology, you need to focus on bio, stats, Python, R, and a hundred other specialized tools for working with data.

If you're more interested in programming, you can get away with much less bio/stats knowledge, unless you're working on developing low-level algorithms. A lot of the work has more to do with efficiently storing, moving, and visualizing large datasets. Bonus here is that much of this knowledge is transferable to other (much higher paying) domains if you get burned out or want to sell out.

My current job could be described as bio-aware web development, with an emphasis in data visualization. I need to know a decent amount of biology, but I can almost always defer stats to others in the lab with more expertise.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn computational biology/immunology?

#14
The resource I recommend to people looking to move from wet lab to dry lab stuff is https://www.biostarhandbook.com/. From your post history it looks like you already have some programming experience, so you could skip the first few chapters which are just a linux intro. I don't think it has all the best practices, but I think it's the most comprehensive overview that starts from square 1 and fills in all the gaps no one tells you when you first start, for example the "Common data types" chapter.
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