What are the best 101 bioinformatics resources available on the net? I am particularly interested in iTunes U courses with video material.
I agree with Michael: I don't think that multimedia is the best approach to learn bioinformatics skills. For one thing, there is not very much of it. Bioinformatics courses are a small fraction of all courses and institutions that post online lectures are a small fraction of all institutions. For another, it's not a time-efficient way to learn. An hour-long video requires your attention for an hour and is unlikely to teach you any practical skills. On the other hand, an online tutorial with code and examples allows you to dip in and out, skip sections, skim through and try out some practical approaches to problems, in your own time.
However, if you simply Google search "itunes lectures bioinformatics", there is some material available. Try instead "online courses bioinformatics" and you'll find these lectures from the MPG or this set of six introductory lectures; much more useful, in my opinion.
It's worth remembering that formal courses in bioinformatics are still a relatively "recent" phenomenon, only offered in the last 10 or even 5 years. Many working bioinformaticians are self-taught, biologists who turned to computer programming. I regard bioinformatics as quite difficult to teach formally because it is not really a field or a discipline; it is a collection of practical approaches for dealing with biological data, where "dealing with" means acquiring, storing, processing, analysing, interpreting and presenting. The best way to learn it is by doing it: grab yourself some data, learn some coding skills and see what you can do.
The education collection @ PLoS Computational Biology is a great resource to learn about different aspects of bioinformatics. There's a lot of articles introducing methodologies and theories.
While I hate spamming, I would like to mention this online course on pharmaceutical biosciences at my former group as Uppsala University, which is free to attend (if you reached 150 ECTS). The content includes: databases drug, sequence, DNA, Statistical Experimental Design, cheminformatics, structure descriptors (molecular and protein sequence), sequence alignments, data analysis (statistics, chemometrics, proteochemometrics, rule based learning, QSAR), model validation, and lead identification and optimization.
The next course starts in January 2011, but you can already sign up here.
Start by reading How To Get Started In Bioinformatics? and Appropriate Podcasts For A Bioinformatician?
And not online but if you want to learn python for bioinformatics: Provide A Book Review For "Bioinformatics Programming Using Python" By Mitchell L. Model
I just saw someone in the field tweet about the NHGRI YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/GenomeTV
It isn't necessarily bioinformatics, but would provide some key background to the data types and analyses.
I've listened in to some of the NHGRI webinar series--be sure to check that out too.
Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy.
version 2.3.6
I think though the best resources are something like BioMart, NCBI web-pages, databases or journals. I doubt that this pod-cast style (didn't know iTunes U c?) is really good for a structured approach, bioinformatics is imho so much better presented in articles or books or university courses. Maybe I am just old fashioned
If you are out for pod-cast style way of learning, why not search Youtube? (I don't dare to sell you this as an answer though;) If you enter "bioinformatics" you get a bunch of hits, some interesting, but not structured. As bioinf. is such a vast field, you need to enter something more specific, eg. "sequence alignment".