David Bioinfo May 2026

At 1:00 PM, the wet-lab team sends me an email: “Hi David, we ran the PCR. Can you just ‘quickly’ align this to the genome and find every variant associated with that rare disease? Thanks! Need it by 3 PM.” I smile. I type. I invoke the sacred magic:

So to my fellow Davids: keep one foot in the terminal and one foot in the literature. Validate your outliers. And for the love of all that is holy—. P.S. If you see me staring blankly at a scatter plot at 4 PM, I’m not stuck. I’m just visualizing principal components and questioning my career choices. 😉

As David the bioinformatician, my real value isn’t typing fast. It’s knowing when a result is biologically plausible vs. computationally correct but nonsense . david bioinfo

Sometimes, I’m a plumber (unclogging data pipelines). Sometimes, a detective (finding a single SNP in 3 billion base pairs). And once a month, I’m a philosopher (arguing whether a p-value of 0.051 is really non-significant).

I’ve learned the hard way that a single misplaced flag in cutadapt can turn your precious RNA-seq reads into biological confetti. My morning ritual? Coffee. htop to see if my server is crying. And grep to make sure my adapter indices didn’t cross-contaminate. At 1:00 PM, the wet-lab team sends me

Hi! I’m David. Ask me what I do, and you’ll get a different answer depending on the day.

Welcome to bioinformatics. It’s not just running BLAST on a Sunday afternoon. Need it by 3 PM

Why ‘rm -rf’ is scarier than a pipette tip, and other truths of digital biology. Introduction: Hello, World (of Omics)