Very interesting view and questions about these "new jobs". I am microbiologist with expertise in bacterial genomics and I am doing the grey box in the middle! Most of the people are lost because I am not epidemiologist and I have only few skills in Bioinformatic BUT I can interpret the data and validate them as a microbiologist. Because I started my career (more than 30 years ago), I have a background on phenotypical traits that are expressed by bacteria. The good way of analyzing the data is to make the link between genotype and phenotype. In addition, I have a good knowledge in genetic of population specific of the different species that I am working on. This is not statistics (that is mainly used by epidemiologist) and this is not Bioinformatics (it's not about a script). In the middle, you have people that have experience in bacteria, the way of detecting, cultivate them, the way of storing, the way of testing them and the way of typing them...but I agree, things are going to change, I am almost a dinosaur now :-)
Great point! I do worry about losing those classical microbiology skills as things move toward molecular detection and sequencing. Thinking about the world of AMR, it's so critical as you say to be tracking both the genotype and phenotype and looking at those datasets together.
Very interesting view and questions about these "new jobs". I am microbiologist with expertise in bacterial genomics and I am doing the grey box in the middle! Most of the people are lost because I am not epidemiologist and I have only few skills in Bioinformatic BUT I can interpret the data and validate them as a microbiologist. Because I started my career (more than 30 years ago), I have a background on phenotypical traits that are expressed by bacteria. The good way of analyzing the data is to make the link between genotype and phenotype. In addition, I have a good knowledge in genetic of population specific of the different species that I am working on. This is not statistics (that is mainly used by epidemiologist) and this is not Bioinformatics (it's not about a script). In the middle, you have people that have experience in bacteria, the way of detecting, cultivate them, the way of storing, the way of testing them and the way of typing them...but I agree, things are going to change, I am almost a dinosaur now :-)
Great point! I do worry about losing those classical microbiology skills as things move toward molecular detection and sequencing. Thinking about the world of AMR, it's so critical as you say to be tracking both the genotype and phenotype and looking at those datasets together.