Want to study bioinformatics, need help! - (Apr/16/2007 )

I will be a fourth-year Biochemistry graduate student in this Fall. So far my research has been going well. But I am not sure yet what I am going to do after finishing PhD. - endless postdoc research? or industry? - dunno yet

In my research, I did a lot of studies on protein structure prediction, docking test, and protein-protein interaction. I am really intrigued by the softwares I used. I was thinking maybe I should study bioinformatics. However, I don't have much computer science background. Although I have learnt Java and PHP + MySQL programming by teaching myself in my spare time, I am still far from being a computer engineer. I have also been maintaining a website that so far has about 1500 registered members.

Because of the gray career prospect for biochemist (you guys may disagree), I would like to study computer science or information system towards a master degree (flexible online program) starting next Spring. If everything goes well, I will expect to obtain my PhD in Biochem and MS in computer science/information system at the same time in summer 2009.

However, I am not sure which program I should take in order to study bioinformatics in future: computer science or information system?

For computer sicnece, there is going to be a lot of exposure to the cores of programming languages, computer hardwares, algorithms, etc.
As far as I understand, the major of information system focuses on the application of programming languages, databases and algorithms.

Your advice will be highly appreciated.

Tony

Try these?

BioInformatics Tutorials:
Online Lectures on Bioinformatics
http://lectures.molgen.mpg.de/online_lectures.html

Web Development for Bioinformatics
Alex Amies talks about an approach and tools for doing web dev in medical informatics. PDF can be tutorial can be downloaded from http://medicalcomputing.net/WebDevelopmentBioinformatics.pdf .

You should think to work in systems biology, a recent field with a lot of posibilities.

If you are interested in computer science, you should try to learn only the skills you need, there are a lot of books for programing for biologists, becouse if you study the whole world of computer science, you may loose many time.

The university of California - Berkeley, have a graduate program in Molecular & Cell Biology http://mcb.berkeley.edu/site/ and you can apply for a minor in bioinformatics.

Hope it helps

I don´t known if there are a bioinformatics course online, but this is the program at berkeley for bioinformatics with a graduate program

http://computationalbiology.berkeley.edu/application.html

Hope it helps

Here you can find a graduate program in Systems Biology

http://www.findaphd.com/clickcount.asp?fpa_id=11

And here you can find out an article about systems biology http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/8120/8120biology.html

Here you can find a bioinformatics course online at University of Tampere, Finland

http://bioinf.uta.fi/courses/presentation/main.html

another bioinformatics course.

http://edu.bioinformatics.org/