By Yannick Wurm, Lecturer in Bioinformatics, Queen Mary University of London.
Biology is a data science
The dramatic plunge in DNA sequencing costs means that a single MSc or PhD student can now generate data that would have cost $15,000,000 only ten years ago. We are thus leaping from lab-notebook-scale science to research that requires extensive programming, statistics and high-performance computing.
This is exciting and empowering - in particular for small teams working on emerging model organisms that lacked…