Introduction to Bioinformatics
Introduction to Bioinformatics is open-access and copyleft introductory book for new generations of Bioinformaticians and Computer Biologists. The novelty behind this initiative is that it's #OpenScience Project - entire Bioinformatics community is welcome to contribute, especially university teachers and students to participate in the project.
The idea is simple and consist of 5 simple steps:
- short-listing the topics: separate chapters ie. genome assembly, RNA-seq, structural bioinformatics etc.
- definition of topics (chapters): experts from respective fields will agree on optimal pipeline for each type of analysis (topic)
- distribution of topics: university teachers will announce and distribute topics (chapters) in the Bioinformatics courses and offer students the possibility to work on each pipeline as an assignment in their course
- writing up: students will form groups focused on individual pipelines (chapters) and come up with detailed description of what’s happening `under the hood` of every step in the pipeline
- assessment: experts that proposed each topic (pipeline) will assess the accuracy of the chapter describing it and provide feedback (grades) back to the teachers allowing fair assessment of each team
We’d like to stress another novelty - such book should be perfect introductory resource for newbies in Bioinformatics, as it’ll be necessarily written by them. This book will contain Bioinformatics pipelines, yet the core of the book will be very detailed description of what’s happening behind the scenes. This will guarantee that this resource will remain up to date even though the underlying pipeline or the data that it operates on will become obsolete (note quick turnover of Bioinformatics tools, formats and technologies, especially in NGS area).