Biology¶
Bioinformatics is a field at the intersection of biology and computer science. Since we’re at NIH, most of the time people already have biology knowledge and want to learn more about the computational side. But there are many cases where experts in computer science would like to learn biology.
The Introduction to Genomics chapter in “Computational Genomics with R” is quite good for getting up to speed on biology.
From Khan Academy, Eukaryotic gene regulation and Eukaryotic transcription factors are useful.
This 2015 review article on high-throughput sequencing technologies is slightly dated, but well-written.
Scitable¶
The journal Nature has many high-quality ebooks used for undergraduate and gradute students in its [Scitable](https://www.nature.com/scitable/) resource.
This site has lots of content, but it doesn’t seem to be updated much. That’s OK; the basic biology parts are good. The genomics parts are a little out of date though. Here, we extract out the parts that are directly relevant to the kind of genomics work being done in BSPC.
Note
The navigation in the Scitable pages is a little confusing – it’s easy to miss the distinction between subheadings for the current section and the headings for other section. Be sure to click through the subheadings in the right-side navigation to make sure you’re seeing all the content.
(can skip Units 3 and 4 if you want)
A separate page on translation from mRNA to protein
A separate page on transcription
A separate page on transcription factors
A separate page on chromatin remodeling
A separate page on functions of RNA
[Subheadings seem to be broken?] Chromatin in eukaryotic regulation, Unit 1 (remodeling)
Other resources¶
Animations of the molecular basis of cells, in case you ever forget how amazing biology is.
Drew Berry talking more about this in his TED talk
Movie of DNA polymerase in action.
Movie molecular basis of life which contains much of the above
Narrated Inner life of a cell
Genome science lectures has some powerpoint slides of basic biology