<p>Can anyone contemplating BiGP at Williams or possibly even going through
it at Williams please comment on what attracts them to this at Williams
and the pros and cons they may have researched....? Please :)</p>
<p>bump ... (10 chars)</p>
<p>Wow this is the second time this particular question has met with
silence on the Williams forum. Since the Williams responders seem to
be helpful normally I can only conclude that there are very few
cognizant with this specific area..... :confused:</p>
<p>BioE 20B or equivalent questions on the MIT forum would have had a dozen
or so answers at this point and the same probably applies to Stanford's
Bioinformatics program or Caltech's Chemical Enginnering with Related
molecular biology specialization. .... but I already have a ton of information
on these programs versus BigP (as it is apparently called in Williams) ....</p>
<p>(from my post at EphBlog.com)</p>
<p>For a start, "-omics" typically refers to full, organism-wide (or even larger, like ecosystem-wide) studies. A genome, therefore, is the genetic information of an entire organism. A "proteome" is the full protein complement of an organism or cell at a given time. An "interactome" is the full set of biochemical interactions of an organism at a given time. There are many other emerging -omic fields as well.</p>
<p>As you can imagine, datasets on these scales are very large, especially if one has more than one sample (e.g. comparing the "transcriptome" of an organism under several conditions, or looking at the human kidney cell proteome under cancerous and non-cancerous conditions). Bioinformatics is the umbrella word for the analysis of such huge datasets in order to "mine" and interpret results. Bioinformatics typically involves computer science, math/stat skills, all with a biological or biochemical slant.</p>
<p>These approaches to biological and biochemical studies are very new (hence the new BiGP program), so it's very understandable why one would wish to want to focus on them. They have the potential to ask and answer questions nobody has been able to approach before, which is science at its most exciting. A project getting started in the lab I work in (a marine chemist working with marine microbiologists) can determine the full complement of active genes of a biological sample in a few hours. By comparing samples taken from nutrient-rich and nutrient-poor conditions, they hope to identify previously unknown genes involved in acquiring particular nutrients. Acquiring the data is the easy part (weeks), but sorting through the expression patterns of tens of thousands of genes in order to pull out one or two of interest is the challenging part (months or more).</p>
<p>ADDED:</p>
<p>Though I did take Genomics/Proteomics with Prof. Wendy Raymond while at Williams, and then later focused on -omics questions in my biology senior seminar, I can't speak to the pros/cons of the BiGP program itself at Williams because it came after my time. However, I imagine the combination of CompSci/Bio/Chem/Math, the program does very well to prepare aspiring students for graduate studies, if only because it would allow them to explore which aspects of "BiGP" are most exciting to them.</p>
<p>arwen: I know nothing about this, and the current Ephs are all in the middle weekend of their two-week spring break. You should e-mail Prof. Raymond and ask her your questions -- if she can't answer them, she will most likely refer you to someone who can. The Williams professors are all willing to help in whatever way/s they can.</p>
<p>Yeah, that. "Bioinformatics Genomics and Proteomics" probably means nothing to most Williams students... I'm kind of a science person, but, that basically means nothing to me.</p>
<p>Thank you for your helpful replies capecodeph and
onemoremom. That is helpful for me to follow up! :D</p>
<p>thanks for sharing your thoughts ephrhymeswbeef ;)</p>
<p>Anytime. Thats what I'm good at, haha.</p>