Your Bioinformatics 'Aha-Experience'

Question

[Fabian Bull]

Sometimes you have a tough problem and you dont see a solution for days. Suddenly you got it.

• or -

One of your project gave a result that was absolutly astonishing for you.

I wonder what was your bioinformatics moment that you will never forget.

To start mine:

Programming a Hidden Markov Model for de novo gene prediction and seeing the results on human genome was a moment I will never forget.

[Fabian Bull]

'doh'-moments are reserved for coding.

[Martin A Hansen]

I would have expected that to be a 'doh!' moment :o)

Answer 1

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

"Aha, I now understand the purpose of that 'bin' field in the UCSC mysql tables"

[Fabian Bull]

Thats what I am talking about :)

Answer 2

[Mary]

Wow, there are that many splice variants for my gene already in the databases?

Note: this was approximately 1995, and when I realized that I got way more done in GenBank in two days than I did in the previous year of pcr + cloning I thought there was really something to this computer stuff. Soon after when all the faculty started seeking me out to do searches for them I realized it was bigger still, and it changed the direction of my career.

Answer 3

[Casey Bergman]

My "a-ha" moment was less about a particular technology or problem and more about the potential of the interaction between computers and DNA.

As an undergrad doing molecular population genetics in the pre-WWW days, we would get sequence from GenBank via email. I was working on re-sequencing the Adh gene in a Drosophila species and wanted to make PCR primers from a published sequence that had been cloned and sequenced in another lab. After fetching the sequence from GenBank and recreating the results in our lab, I realized that the internet had played a role in the replication of a DNA sequence from a fly in lab 1 to GenBank to tube in lab 2. OK, the internet didn't actually provide the polymerase or the dNTPs, but it did play a crucial role in the copying of biological information. This was the moment that the synergy between bases and bits became clear to me and that I needed to learn how to program to survive in science.