Anybody here in bioinformatics, mircobio, or biochem?
I'm a ChemEng major but I've started taking mircobio classes even though they won't count towards my degree. The idea of doing genetic research just gives me a hard on.
How difficult is it to get into genetic research? What's it like?
If your school has an iGEM team, get involved. I started out as a chemfag for undergrad. I got involved and picked up the tools of the trade for genetic manipulation, plus I got a paper out of it. I'm starting my PhD in this shit in the fall. I also got to go to the conference in Boston, which was dope af
>hooked up w qt biochem girl from Scotland
>tfw we'll never meet again
what was your degree in?
Microbio here
Depends on the level of genetic engineering
*genetic research
I've done a simple bacterial operon gene removal and interpreted results/ did bioinformatics as an undergrad but shit like altering human embryos via crispr is far harder
Check with your ChemE department. Mine we have two guys doing genetic stuff. One does computational and the other does experimental. Also some guys who do systems biology.
human alteration is exactly what gets me all hot bothered and makes me want to reconsider my love for chem.
i wish we had that stuff. but the only biorelated projects we have going on right meow is various catalyst applications, Musculoskeletal mechanics, Mammalian cellular mechanics, Biofilm Engineering, and some protein engineering.
Microbio here. It's fun. I'm experimenting with iron reducing bacteria right now but a few years ago I helped a professor out in expressing certain rotifer genes via our lord and savior E. coli to try to understand their horizontal gene transfer mechanism better.
By "their" I mean they rotifers' HGT mechanism, not E coli. That's well understood.
There are fuckton of genetic research everywhere, any bio lab practically does some genetic manipulation.
For serious genetics analysis you will need to learn python for sure, MATLAB and R maybe and be very familiar with NEB technical catalogue and addgene.
>do some reading up
>take a few more classes if you can
>bug genetics profs about positions
Biochem here. The research is quite fun, but long and has a tendency to fuck up without warning. Just keep at it, and you'll pull through
Chemistry
I was valuable to the team because I knew my way around a mass spec and HPLC
>How difficult is it to get into genetic research?
Email a PI at your university, ask if you can work in the lab.
Hows Bioelectronics? Gotta choose a field soon
Never done any genome stuff. It almost seems from the outside looking in that the possible application would be mind bogglingly revolutionary, but the actual work would be some of the most boring shit imaginable. Designer babies would be the greatest thing that humanity has ever achieved, but fuck I can't picture how difficult, tedious, and unstimulating the research must be.
Biochem graduate here. Don't expect anything better than a lab tech position without at least a master's. I know engineers can usually stop after a bachelor's, but if you want to actually be involved in research you'll want to be getting a graduate degree.
>genetics research
>Not epigenetics
Kek, good luck discovering anything useful
this post is what happens when a non-biofag thinks he knows anything about the field
What do you plan to do desu?
>microbiology courses don't count in my ChE degree
Retard. You do know that the industrial production of fermentation products for example requires bioreactors reaching capacities of 100L or more? Chemical engineers are needed for those. Those microbiology classes you're taking counts.
That's a fucking dope metro map.
>altering human embryos via crispr is far harder
you will never get past your ethics committee
How much genetic manipulation equipment would a fertilization clinic possess? Maybe there's some underground research projects going on without anyone knowing.
I mean it's already being used to aliviate genetic disorders. The ethics issues arise when designer babies come to the fray.
i had to take a intro to mirco, one gen biochem class, and one gen mirco class. those 3 classes are like the minimal shit. I was saying I've been taking the classes more geared towards actual mirco/biochem majors that literally won't count towards my degree.
heres 2 high res maps if you're interested:
biochemical-pathways.com
biochemical-pathways.com
roche use to make these as full sized posters. They would send them to you free of cost if you worked in a lab. Sadly they stopped doing that. I would have liked to hang one on my wall.
Firstly, getting into research should be easy. Prepare to tradeoff excitingness in your field for dollars. Neither will be high.
I just finished a mol bio major and am going into health informatics. Genetic research seems like slow, uncreative, bitch work to me.
Why do you like this?
Bioinformatician here but mostly focused on (plant) genomics rather than genetics.
One comment I'd like to make is that it's shocking how much "big data" stuff is just laying around after having been generated. The NGS revolution over the past decade and a half really generated more data than most people know what do do with and more is made every day, used in a very limited capacity them stashed away in a public repository.
The fun part for a bioinformatician is that all this data is your playground where people involved with wetter lab work are either a) slaving away to generate individual data points, or b) being made obsolete by new, automated and/or high-throughput methods.
*Also it should be noted that 'bioinformatics' specifically, as opposed to say 'computational biology' is more about the computer science and algorithmics rather than the actual biology, so whether that interests you or not is a big factor.
I get giddy when discussing algorithms but I know not everyone is like that. Molecular biologists seem lost and/or uninterested during my seminar talks.
Though it's still nice to have those. A while back I was talking about a novel visualisation algorithm and a had throwaway slide demonstrating one (not particularly interesting - to me) aspect of it; but the biologists in the group latched onto it and spent 20 minutes discussing it which annoyed me at the time because it was an unimportant detail within the scope of my work. It seemed to them one of the things I was showing was very unlikely from a genetic perspective.
It turned into what will probably one of my highest impact papers (currently being reviewed) because it accidentally revealed a very interesting structural oddity present (but invisible to most other methods) in an entire family of economically important plants.
bump
you mean catgirls? or the usual "owner of clinic fathers 5000 children over the course of his career" shting