Metagenomis - the microbes in you Q & A
Q: What is the difference between ‘wet lab’ and ‘computational lab’?
A: In genomics, a wet lab is what we would consider a traditional laboratory, where, for example, DNA is isolated from biological material and sequenced. Wet lab work also typically involves experiments using cultured cells or other biological systems, whereby the cells are manipulated and measurements are taken, such as gene expression levels. A computational lab, or "dry lab" is generally a set of desktop workstations linked to high performance computer infrastructure, that exists for the purpose of data analysis, where the data sets are larger than can be handled by ordinary PCs that exist in a wet lab. In genomics, these data sets could consist of billions or trillions of bases of DNA sequence. The approach is generally to compare data from different samples (eg. tumour cells versus normal cells) to find patterns or signatures (eg. tumour specific mutations that may cause cancer). This is only one example, computational might also do evolutionary analysis of DNA, or model at the molecular level how drugs and proteins interact in cells. Most often computational labs come up with associations or predictions that then need to be fed back to a wet lab for further experiments to test these predictions.
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Q: What would the scientist in a computational lab do?
A: Computational scientists ( also called Bioinformaticians) typically use standard programming languages and tools (eg. PERL, PYHTON, R, SQL), plus mathematical and statistical approaches, to design, build and use computer programs for the purpose of analyzing very large data sets.
