How hard is it to do independent publishable bioinformatics/RNA-Seq research?

[InquilineKea]

So I'm wondering - how hard is it to do independent publishable bioinformatics research with just a laptop? Is there precedent for it? Is it a trend we'll see more in the future?

I don't need to be paid for this - someone else is willing to support me.

Eventually, I'm thinking of maybe looking into RNA-Seq datasets from https://www.liv.ac.uk/integrative-bi...-de-magalhaes/, as I'm very interested in aging.

[dpryan]

It depends a lot on the nature of the research. Some things are CPU bound, others RAM, others disk IO. I generally use my laptop to work on a larger computer remotely. BTW, get two monitors.

[InquilineKea]

Okay. How would getting two monitors be helpful?

[dpryan]

It's typically the case in bioinformatics that you need a lot of screen space while doing an analysis/writing code. It's really the same reason most software engineers use two monitors.