Bioinformatics for a medical student with interest in genetics

Question

[thalesalexandrefa]

Hi,

I'm a medical student with genetics, and I have come to understand some knowledge in bioinformatics would help me getting a research position in the field. I've been browsing the internet for some course, but all the ones I've found so far did not suit my needs. Does anyone know of an online bioinformatics course that:

1. is affordable
2. is open to an undergraduate medical student
3. provides a certificate
4. teaches you the most important things for genetic, genomic and molecular biology research

Answer 1

[Garan]

You might want to try a few courses that go through the clinical utility of NGS and bioinformatics (although bioinformatics doesn't stop at NGS it is curently one of the main uses)

Genomic Medicine University of Exeter https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/diabetes-genomic-medicine

The Genomics Era: the Future of Genetics in Medicine https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/the-genomics-era

Clinical Bioinformatics: Unlocking Genomics in Healthcare https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/bioinformatics

Cancer in the 21st Century: the Genomic Revolution https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/cancer-and-the-genomic-revolution

They only mention bioinformatics briefly, but they do put Genomic technologies and the analysis in the context of what is useful for the clinician.

Probably the next step is to look at variant interpretation and guidelines - which useful if you're heading down the the route of a Clinical Geneticist specialisation (course is not free - although I think it might be distance learning based).

Post Graduate Certificate in The Interpretation and Clinical Application of Genomic Data (PGCertICAG)

Also most of the content of the courses seems to be currently aimed at either Rare Disease or Cancer genetics and the other major strand - Microbiology / Virology genomics isn't as well covered.

Bioinformatics courses:

For pure bioinformatics courses not necessarily geared towards clinical areas (mainly Coursera ones as mentioned by previous post):

Bioinformatics Specialization https://www.coursera.org/specializations/bioinformatics

Bioinformatic Methods I & II https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics-methods-1 https://www.coursera.org/learn/bioinformatics-methods-2

Genomic Data Science Specialization https://www.coursera.org/learn/python-genomics

Also check out courses on Python (or another easy to learn scripting language such as Ruby), R (or another Stats language), possibly SQL and algorithm development.

[Dan D]

Nice work putting that list together.

[thalesalexandrefa]

Thank you so much for this.

Answer 2

[Shamim Sarhadi]

https://www.coursera.org/

[thalesalexandrefa]

There is only this course there. Would you recommend it?

Answer 3

[Dan D]

The Data Analysis for Life Sciences series from EdX meets all of your criteria. I've been too busy to enroll, but I did get my hands on some of the notes and lectures and they're top-notch.