Zhiqun+Xie

I was first trained as chemist and then computational biologist, and found my way through organic chemistry, structural bioinformatics, genomic and metagenomic bioinformatics, and informatics to learn: how to calculate, predict or model the mutation, variation, and interaction of the elements such as amino acid residue and domain in protein structure at atomic scale; and how to process and compare the sequences of bacterial genome and microbiome metagenome from high throughput sequencing platforms. I did research projects on protein domain identification, protein mutation prediction, protein structure modeling, protein-protein interaction and docking, as well as the projects on the identification of mobile genetic elements in bacterial genome and metagenome. I also enjoyed serving as bioinformatics and informatics engineer or team leader to support the scientists in biotech R&D environment and academic institutions. I always tried my best to do the diverse scientific research projects and technical support services as long as what I did would benefit community, colleagues, collaborators and customers/users.

Programming and data analysis in bioinformatics is my routine work when I sit in front of a computer. My first love is C programming under Unix/Linux but now it is Python as the computing power is much easier to obtain now than before and Python is a good language to quickly prototype a program module to test my ideas though most of those ideas will not go to publication. I sometimes used PHP and SQL (MySQL) to develop the databases with web interface. I began in 2016 to use git to help control and maintain my source codes, and push to my github site, https://github.com/xiezhq.

My interests are actually scattered in quite different fields, protein, genome, metagenome, high performance computing and user support. I enjoyed solving the problems for others and satisfying people when they came to me and seek my suggestion or help for whatever they concerned. User support work is sometimes much more challenging than we image as you will be hit by many chanllenging tasks and have to find a solution in the unknown field where you do not have any previous knowledge and experience on it.