Insights!

Insight 1

It seems that the biggest challenge facing the study of bioinformatics, and what might be causing the most pain to bioinformaticians, is inconsistency in data across databases. I've learned in previous courses and seen directly in this course that the IDs of the same gene or protein are different across different databases, and a lot of energy and brain power must go into being able to convert the IDs so that the data is consistent throughout an experiment. Whether that is by using an existing conversion tool such as BioMart, or creating a new algorithm. I now see that another major problem is that the data that is input into GEO is not regulated at many levels. So even doing something like pulling a dataset from GEO will not be so easy because, for example, even organism names are not always the same. There are many factors to take into consideration when doing bioinformatics analyses, so we must always take extra care.

Insight 2

Insight 3