At 1:00 PM, the wet-lab team sends me an email: “Hi David, we ran the PCR. Can you just ‘quickly’ align this to the genome and find every variant associated with that rare disease? Thanks! Need it by 3 PM.” I smile. I type. I invoke the sacred magic:
Why ‘rm -rf’ is scarier than a pipette tip, and other truths of digital biology. Introduction: Hello, World (of Omics) david bioinfo
The first rule of : Always check your checksums. At 1:00 PM, the wet-lab team sends me
I found 10,000 variants. The lab expected 5. Did I mis-call indels? Is there a batch effect? Did someone accidentally use the mouse reference genome again? (It happened once. Once.) Need it by 3 PM
Here’s a structured blog post tailored for someone named working in bioinformatics . It’s written to be engaging, professional, and relatable to peers in computational biology. Title: From Command Lines to Chromosomes: A Day in the Life of David, Bioinformatician
You can have the cleanest pipeline, the most parallelized code, and a server with 1TB of RAM. But if you don’t understand the biological question, you’re just moving bytes around.
Sometimes, I’m a plumber (unclogging data pipelines). Sometimes, a detective (finding a single SNP in 3 billion base pairs). And once a month, I’m a philosopher (arguing whether a p-value of 0.051 is really non-significant).