Platforms to get help for Bioinformatics related problems.
As a Bioinformatics researcher/student you should know these five platforms for finding answers to your queries/problems. I hope you will find it helpful.
1. Biostars
Biostars is specifically dedicated to Bioinformatics and Computational biology-related problems. It provides both general and topic-specific solutions to the queries posed by users. There are separate navigation pages for RNA-Seq data analysis, CHIP-SEQ technology, various tools and tutorials, and also job advertisements. Biostars is home to amazing threads on various topics. It is easy to use and get benefited from. You can either join the site by signing up or explore it as a guest user.
2. ResearchGate
ResearchGate is a scientific community network home to around 17 million scientists and researchers from all over the world. It is an open network where you can find research articles, data, and its most impressive feature is its Q&A forum which provides answers to various questions and problems that you are facing during your research. For bioinformaticians, it has hundreds of experts from the field that are quite active in giving solutions to the posed queries.
3. Bioinformatics Stack Exchange
Bioinformatics Stack Exchange is a question-&-answer site for researchers, developers, students, teachers, and end users interested in bioinformatics.
4. r/bioinformatics on Reddit
r/bioinformatics is a subreddit dedicated to bioinformatics, computational genomics and systems biology.
5. SEQanswers
SEQanswers is next generation sequencing community dedicated to sequencing related queries.
Community Forums
Besides the above-mentioned sources, you can also reach out to various communities and forums related to specific programs. Like for python or biopython related queries, there are active forums for problem solving. Similarly, R programming related queries can be solved by exploring various dedicated forums. Bioconductor provides a dedicated support site for its packages. Ask Ubuntu is a dedicated platform for Ubuntu (Linux) related issues. Software hosting site GitHub also has a devoted support community where you can find solutions to your queries. Besides, all the major bioinformatics sources like databases and tools have their own community forums to solve user-specific queries.