Carrier in Bioinformatics
Gajendra P.S. Raghava
Friday, 08 February 2008 17:59 UTC
In past there is lot of hype about bioinformatics. This is the reason in last 5 years, we have many universities in India which are offering degree/diplomas (M.Sc., B.Sc., B.Tech, etc. ) in bioinformatics. Interestingly most of universities do not have trained bioinformaticians still they are able to attract lots of students. Probable students are comparing bioinformatics with information technology and jumping in this field. We are also getting news that students are facing problem in finding the jobs. I have little knowledge about scope of bioinformaticians in industry but I know there is lot of scope in research or academics. I wants to know others view on “Carriers in Bioinformatics” particularly industry and problems faced by bioinformatics students.
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Dear Dr. Raghava,
Thank you for initiating a very nice talk on “Career in Bioinformatics in India.” I agree that Bioinformatics in India was a hype. But I feel it has still been hype with many students trying to put their hands in Bioinformatics. But if we think of this, I feel and one should understand that Bioinformatics is only a tool where any biologist can use it while Computational Biology as a discipline can be brought in the form of academics. I see a few institutes in India that offers Masters in Computational Biology. Let there be well trained organizations emodied and recognized by CSIR/DBT/UGC. I strongly feel that priviate organizations are no good and they should understand that they are playing with the IQ/mind set of budding biologists.I also have another impression: Let Science graduates be given a thought on this. I find many engineering graduates chosing this field on the pretext that they might be good at programming, which (I feel!) lands true only to few elite sections of Engineering Colleges.
I would love to continue this discussion on this while you may go through this page:
http://bioclues.org/mgxroot/page10734.html -
I will appreciate if somebody on net write about job scope of bioinformaticians in industry/private. I will soon write about scope of bioinformatics in research. I also wants to know experience of persons working in private or industry. This important because most of youngster are coming in bioinformatics with high salary expectations.
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Thanks Raghava for the posting,
As you given, there is lots of hype about bioinformatics. Also, there is lots of scope in the market for bioinformatics. Before going for scope lets think about bioinformatics.Concerning, to me its application of informatics in biology. To become expert in the field one needs expertise in biology subjects like molecular biology, biochemistry, immunology. And, in the informatics side one should have sound knowledge in languages like Perl, Python and should have good knowledge in database systems and other web based technologies. Also, one need a bit of maths.
Job opportunities in this field are growing, and very soon, in next 2-3 years, this field needs lots of experts. A bioinformatics person can expect employment in different industry like Biotechnology, Biopharmaceuticals, KPOs, RPOs, and the companies that working only bioinformatics and bio related database development.
Here, I am much focusing on KPOs. KPOs are involved in mainly providing services in the fields of life sciences and pharma research, web based market research, and others. Life sciences and pharma research mainly includes bioinformatics, IP. According to a web based report, Indian KPO sector is going to employ more than 250,000 KPO professionals by 2010, compared with the current figure of 25,000 employees. And, there are some KPOs that started operations in this field and others are planning.
In my opinion there are jobs in the market and number of jobs will grow, only thing we need to think that are we equipped with enough skills?
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I worked in Ocimumbio Solutions for nearly 4 years. Job opportunity in Bioinformatics industry is limited by the fact that in a typical company the number of Bioinformatician is around 20%. Rest are programmers, pure biologist, pure statistician and mathematician, testing guys, support, technical writers and administrative staff etc. There are not very large number of companies to absorb the number of people coming out with Bioinformatics course. Still there is place for good candidates specially who can work with logistics, understand mathematics specially algorithms and can incorporate them to biological problems. Some companies working on biological database employ a lot of Biologist with some understanding of Bioinformatics.
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I did my masters in computational and then turned to experimental for PhD. I feel its very important to have expertise in one area first, lets say biology or medicinal chemistry. Then u can think abt big projects in the area and understand the problems in better way. By having knowledge only abt computational approaches, its difficult to understand real world problems. So I feel if u dont want to be an experimentalist but a pure bioinformatician, it is highly important to have sound knowledge of computers, programming etc.
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In academics or research, bioinformaticians have lots of scope. Its other way round, academic institues are not getting good bioinformaticians so most of positions are vacate in lack of suitable candidates. Long time back we advertise post and also request on inbios group (inbios@yahoo.com) if anybody is interested in joining as scientist. Surprising no suitable candidate apply or post. Initially I thought we are not getting good bioinformaticians in Indian institutes due to low salary. Recently, I was involved in searching suitable bioinformatics person for USA university (UAMS ) and for my surprise we were not able to attract good bioinformaticians.
Its not that their is shortage of persons who have degree in bioinformatics. It is problem of gap between knowledge of candidates and expetation of research institutes. Most of bioinformaticians are in category of users; they have knowledge of bioinformatics software and how to use them. Where as most of academic institutes need other category of persons called developers. First category of persons are good if they are biologist and they are doing their biological research, as knowledge of bioinformatics is important for minimizing of biological experimental. For making carrier in bioinformatics one need to have capability of develping better method than existing methods. I mean knowledge of programming, machine learning techniques, unix adiminstration and understanding of biological problem.
I am still not clear about scope of bioinformatics in industry and private company. I know bioinformatics companies are facing tough time due to competitions with academicians. As culture of freeware or public domain software is dominant in bioinformatics. Everyday we are getting more accurate bioinformatics software free from academic institute. For example bioinformatics centre of our institute have developed more 70 software/webserver/databases ) and all are free for academic use. In this situation it is really difficult for bioinformatics companies to grow. I wants to know views of other members of our group.
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I like the active discussion about scenario of Bioinformatics career in India. My view point would be completely from student’s perspective. I was one of the early M.Sc Bioinformatics postgrduates from India. I completed my M.Sc in June 2006. Presently I am PhD student from University of Heidelberg, Germany.
When I was sitting for my first class, needless to say, with lots of hope and expectations from so called “Bioinformatics” world. During the course of time, I realized that a critical examination is required as to what “I want to do”. It is very important to have excellent knowledge on practical aspects of Bioinfo tools, programming knowledge (which language is not a question as in future it is lab dependent, once you learn one of the basics, learning rest would not be difficult) as this makes you “different” than other biologists, involvement in lot of self projects or from renowned institute is MUST if one has to survive the competition.Now answering Dr. Raghava’s question about “career” aspect. If one has to venture into industry after M.Sc, there is no point of doing “masters in bioinformatics” as in 99% of cases solid IT guys would do better than us. Many of my colleagues, have joined some small firms but none of them are satisfied.
However, it makes sense to do PhD in your “computational” interest area so that further you can join any lab or industry with sheer independence of carrying “scientific” computational work. -
Bioinformatics in India has got a limited scope in a fragmented manner. Here in India we have a poor state of an approach towards the discipline thereby ending up with nothing but hype. Going forward it has to be streamlined in terms of research as well as a professional one. Many private sectors we do have in India portraying as Bioinformatics service providers, but end up in exercising some low end work like data mining and database development. One should be known with the fact that developing logical modules (algorithms/rule-based) and doing analytics on top of the existing raw data are the ones which requires bioinformatics skills and possess a global scope in the field of Life Sciences and Healthcare, to name a few.
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Hi Raghava,
Where Private Companies makes money.
1) Although there are lots of free servers, there is lack of comprehensive softwares. Formatting data for different servers/softwares makes it time-consuming. Commercial companies addresses these problems.
2) There are lots of commercial companies for whom the academic freewares are not free. There is the market for commercial developers.
3) Patent is now coming in big way even in academics. Any data submitted on web-server is considered as disclosure and hence unfit for patent. There the market for commercial companies.
4) Excellent graphics (normally freewares are superior in algorithms but inferior in graphics). Theres the market.
5) Low end development. Academics are not interested. Commercial does that.
6) Lab and knowledge integration. Academia is not interested. Market for commercial companies.
7) Poor support for most of the academic softwares. Many scientist don’t like reading documents after documents. They want the solution fast.
8) Analysis software for Biotechnology instrument. Unfortunately India is way back in this.Jai
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This is continuation to my previous posting:
Because of the reasons mentioned by me, some of the most popular used bioinformatics softwares are still the ones which are commercially developed.
e.g
Microarray Data Analysis: Genespring
Sequence Analysis: GCG
Pathways analysis: Ingenuity
Promoter Analysis: Genomatrix
Protein structure: Insight
LIMS: LabwareThere is a lot of potential for Bioinformatics Industry. But for most of the IT companies in India which ventured into Bioinformatics, were looking for easy and quick money, and most of them failed. I did my Advanced Diploma in Bioinformatics from Pune Univ in 2000-2001, and thats the time when IT was down and every IT company wanted to venture in Bioinformatics. It seemed that there was flood of opportunity(every company wanted to appoint us), but within an year or 2, all of them disappeared or were on the verge of collapse and losses. The easy money makers were the ones who started the training course. For 3 months course they were charging more that 50,000. Within few years there rates dropped drastically and many disappeared. So thats the sad story of bio-infomatics hype.
But Bioinformatics in Industry has a lot of scope. But we need people with vision, people who can think of 5 years ahead and people who can co-ordinate such development, and people who can work on new concepts and be the first to come in market.
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