About esohinformatics

Learning bioinformatics can be challenging, especially in Africa where resources are limited, including expert supervision/mentorship. In addition, many students tend to have numerous distracting commitments due in part to limited funding for their studies. Some of those who are fortunate to get funding face highly unstructured curricula or curricula that include little to nothing in Bioinformatics, and are thus left to learn the core Bioiformatics on their own.

Simply put, I learned Bioinformatics the very hard way. Luckily, I had Google and YouTube to help me. But more importantly, I learned by having a specific problem to solve, my MSc project (described below). I believe patience, persistence, and resilience, in addtion to passionate curiosity are key to learning Bioinformatics (as are key to learning anything). I can say I have picked up a few tricks that should be useful to new learners as well as to other Bioinformaticians.

esohinformatics is a platform to share some the tricks I picked from my approach to learning Bioinformatics, as well as to share my solutions to some of the problems I have encountered doing Bioinformatics or problems that colleagues have shared with me and that do not have comprehensive solutions in the public domain. I will share these in the form of tutorials and short posts. I will also share workflows that I have developed for various projects.

I will also share some command-line tricks that can really make your Bioinformatics life easy.

What I do/can do

Core areas

I work with data in these areas routinely/regularly.

On needs basis

I have worked with data in these areas extensively previously, but currently do so only on special requests. I have developed pipelines/workflows for colleagues in most of the areas.

About me

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Kevin Esoh from Cameroon.

I am a PhD candidate in Human Genetics in the Division of Human Genetics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. I work part-time as a Bioinformatician for the GeneMAP research group.

I did my MSc studies in Bioinformatics and molecular biology in Kenya funded by DELGEME. My project was based on malaria genomics in Cameroon where I first characterized the genetic structure of some Cameroonian malaria-endemic populations, and then I screened the genomes of the populations for malaria susceptibility markers. The genetic structure study was published in Scientific Reports here. The genome-wide assoction study (GWAS) uncovered two novel malaria protective genes and it is currently under review.

Before moving to Kenya, I did my undergrad studies in Cameroon at the University of Buea (UB) from 2012-2015. I majored in Biochemistry and minored in Medical Laboratory Technology graduating with first class honors (I couldn’t have picked a better field).

After my BSc program, I enrolled for an MSc in Biochemistry in UB from 2016-2017, completed coursework and started a project before getting the scholarship to study in Kenya.

The project was bioinformatics-oriented as I had become particulary interested in the field. The project was titled Reverse vaccinology for Onchocerciasis vaccine development. I screened the entire proteome of Onchocerca volvulus (the parasite that causes onchocerciasis or riverblindness), consisting of over 12,000 proteins for antigenic or immunogenic proteins with the goal of finding potential vaccine candidates. The project was continued by my senior who was doing his PhD in Belgium on diagnostic strategies. I workied with him closely and we eventually published one of the first comprehensive papers on reverse vaccinology based on multiple predicted epitopes from different antigenic proteins.

Education Summary

More info

Learn more about me and my education from my Q&A with the Kenya Education Network