If I were giving career advice to my son (who’s only four-years-old by the way), I would tell him to consider going into informatics. And if I were really pushy, I’d suggest bioinformatics. With computing power increasing exponentially and the internet offering up overwhelming amounts of information, we need people who can figure out a way to organize it all so the rest of us can actually deal with it. One such person is Stew (pseudonym) of Flags and Lollipops and postgenomic. I’m glad he took time out of his busy schedule working at Nature in the web publishing department to do this genetics interview for us!

Hsien Lei: You work in bioinformatics which I think is the glue that holds the genome revolution together. What kind of role do you think bioinformatics plays?

Euan Adie: I’d agree: modern day genetics relies on vast quantities of data that you couldn’t begin to navigate or process efficiently without software of some sort. Nowadays sequence ‘search engines’ like BLAST and genome browsers like Ensembl are standard tools for genetics researchers. On an even more basic level, without sequence alignment algorithms there’d be no complete genomes to search or browse in the first place.

That’s the data processing side of bioinformatics. It’s also got a role to play in creating new data from the old. By doing clever things with existing information you can, for example, take a novel gene, feed it through machine learning algorithms and get back a predicted function based on the sequences of genes that have already been studied, or model a particular process in a cell, or predict which point mutation out of many on a particular gene is most likely to be responsible for causing some disease.

Computers and machine learning algorithms. Bioinformaticians will not be short on job offers anytime soon.