Bioinformatics Technicians
If you look at the insert inside any medicine package, you'll find important information like the medicine's ingredients, its intended use, dosage instructions, contraindications, and more. This information shows you just how precise the process of manufacturing medicine really is. Pharmaceutical manufacturing is one of the largest and most important industries in the world - drug scientists run thousands of studies and trials on human volunteers in order to find treatments for various diseases. The massive technological progress the world has seen over the past decades has also helped enormously in advancing research and trials in medicine, biology, and drug manufacturing. Advanced computer technology and software are now used to study the different components and parts of the human body, and the field that combines computer techniques with biology has been given the name "bioinformatics." There are several specializations within this field - for example, a bioinformatics scientist develops the computational techniques used to study the human body, while a bioinformatics technician is responsible for using computer programs to tally and analyze the data produced by trials and research.
Meet the Writer: Waleed Abo Omiraa
What You'll Actually Do
The core tasks and responsibilities that fill a typical day.
- Develop or maintain applications that process biologically based data into searchable databases for purposes of analysis, calculation, or presentation.
- Enter or retrieve information from structural databases, protein sequence motif databases, mutation databases, genomic databases or gene expression databases.
- Analyze or manipulate bioinformatics data using software packages, statistical applications, or data mining techniques.
- Confer with researchers, clinicians, or information technology staff to determine data needs and programming requirements and to provide assistance with database-related research activities.
- Create data management or error-checking procedures and user manuals.
- Document all database changes, modifications, or problems.
- Extend existing software programs, web-based interactive tools, or database queries as sequence management and analysis needs evolve.
- Maintain awareness of new and emerging computational methods and technologies.
- Participate in the preparation of reports or scientific publications.
- Write computer programs or scripts to be used in querying databases.
- Conduct quality analyses of data inputs and resulting analyses or predictions.