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What languages are used for bioinformatics?

Nowadays biologists are using informatics and programming a lot in their work. And they have made many scientific discoveries with help of informatics. The question is, which programming languages (or any other instruments) do biologists use in their work?

1st Mar 2018, 7:32 PM
Evil Dog
Evil Dog - avatar
3 Answers
+ 7
Python is widely used for nature sciences. It even has a module called "biopython".
1st Mar 2018, 8:55 PM
Chris
Chris - avatar
+ 3
i believe they would be python, perl and matlab, i myself use matlab. as for instruments, there are softwares like docking, blast besides all the machinery used for things such as gene sequence.
1st Mar 2018, 9:06 PM
capsloth
capsloth - avatar
0
C and C++ C or C++ are great for making super optimized command-line tools like aligners and variant-callers, but you will have a much easier time learning Python first and then going to these high-performance languages for a particular problem in the future, since they are harder to learn, more finicky, and take a lot more code to do the same thing. JavaScript or PHP JavaScript and PHP are great languages for web applications, but bioinformatics web applications should never be your first project. You could make a computational method in Python or R and then later make it into a web application, but that is not a project for a beginner. HTML and CSS by the way are not programming languages, but actually markup and styling languages that you will use along with JavaScript and PHP for that web application someday. Java Java is a popular language that most people have heard of. In bioinformatics, a notable example is the genome browser IGV. However, I would not recommend for beginners to learn Java due to many issues including memory management and that Python and R have many more bioinformaticians who build packages and answer questions online. https://crbtech.in/programmes/clinical-research-training-programme
21st Dec 2018, 10:52 AM
Soumya Shrivastav
Soumya Shrivastav - avatar