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Ming Tommy Tang

@tommytang.bsky.social
4.4K followers 1.4K following 16K posts

Director of bioinformatics at AstraZeneca. On my way to helping 1 million people learn bioinformatics. Educator, Biotech, single cell. Also talks about leadership. Grab my new book divingintogeneticsandgenomics.kit.c…

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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 17h
Just published: "4 tests before you trust vibe-coded results". Check it out and subscribe to get everything I'm making. divingintogeneticsandgenomics.kit.com/posts/4-tes...
divingintogeneticsandgenomics.kit.com
4 tests before you trust vibe-coded results
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 17h
1/ I’ve reviewed hundreds of bioinformatics GitHub repos in my career. Here’s the brutal truth: most tool documentation fails the people it’s meant to help. And it’s not because the algorithms are bad.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 18h
You shared your code. They used it at a conference. No mention. No credit. I've been there. Here's why I still share everything — and why it led to this book.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
🧵 You’re not behind in bioinformatics. The truth? The field just evolves faster than any single human can follow.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The person most likely to need your documentation is you, six months from now — staring at your own code with no idea how it works. Documentation isn't optional.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Keith Baggerly calls it “forensic bioinformatics.” His talk proves reproducibility saves lives. The Importance of Reproducible Research in High-Throughput Biology www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gY... clinical trials started using the wrong results. (watch it!)
youtube.com
The Importance of Reproducible Research in High-Throughput Biology
VideoLectures.NetView the talk in context: http://videolectures.net/cancerbioinformatics2010_baggerly_irrh/View the complete Cancer Bioinformatics Workshop, ...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
scplotter provides a set of functions to visualize single-cell sequencing data in an easy and efficient way github.com/pwwang/scpl...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
1/ Most bioinformatics errors don’t come from bad science. They come from work you can’t reproduce. And when that happens, you don’t just waste time. You risk patients’ lives.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The person most likely to need your documentation is you, six months from now — staring at your own code with no idea how it works. Documentation isn't optional.
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Reposted by Ming Tommy Tang
Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Founding readers get the free 15-lesson sampler now + the lowest price in November 👉 divingintogeneticsandgenomics.kit.com/wtdt_bioinf...
divingintogeneticsandgenomics.kit.com
What They Don't Teach You — Founding Waitlist
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Local antibody-driven response to anti-PD-1 blockade www.nature.com/articles/s4...
nature.com
Local antibody-driven response to anti-PD-1 blockade
Nature Cancer - Local antibody-driven response to anti-PD-1 blockade
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
🧵 You’re not behind in bioinformatics. The truth? The field just evolves faster than any single human can follow.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Messy data is why your "quick" analysis takes all afternoon. One principle — tidy data — makes everything downstream faster and far less error-prone.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
On October 27, I’ll be joining a panel discussion on how multiomics is changing the way drug discovery teams understand disease biology and evaluate new therapeutic opportunities.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Fc-optimized GITR antibody enhances a CD4 T cell–dendritic cell crosstalk to promote antitumor immunity www.nature.com/articles/s4...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
1/ Ever see a stunning bioinformatics figure and think: “How on earth did they make that?” Let’s break it down so you can recreate it.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Running your RNA-seq steps by hand, one script at a time? A workflow language like Snakemake reruns only what changed — and makes your pipeline reproducible by anyone.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Identification of cycling regulatory T cell precursors as conductors of immune escape during breast carcinoma progression www.cell.com/cancer-cell...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Depending on your data type, use the right plot to tell the story. A nice interactive app to determine what plots you need www.data-to-viz.com/
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The simplest reproducibility habit almost nobody teaches: date your directories. 2025-09-15_project beats "final_v2_REAL_final" every single time.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
really enjoyed all the episodes from Approved podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/... If you like Acquired, you will like it but for biotech companies.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
γδ T cells modulate anti-tumor immunity in small cell lung cancer www.cell.com/cancer-cell...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Want to master bioinformatics data visualization? I almost quit when I first tried ggplot2. But once I “got it,” it changed how I saw data forever. Here’s the hard-won path that makes ggplot2 click. 🧵
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
If you're doing bioinformatics without Git, you're one accidental overwrite away from losing weeks of work. Here's the version-control setup every bioinformatician should have.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
1/ You tested 10,000 genes. 500 are significant (p < 0.05). Exciting? Maybe. But if you used raw p-values, you just got played by randomness. Let’s talk FDR.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
1/ What the heck is an "object" (like a Seurat object) in programming? If you're in bioinformatics, this term shows up a lot. Let’s break it down with examples that actually make sense 🧵
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
You can install every fancy tool in the world. If you can't move around Unix, you'll still be slow. Unix is the one skill that makes every other bioinformatics skill faster.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
"The bioinformatician is not being replaced. The job is what it always was: understand the biology, know where the tools fail, and trust output only as we understand and can measure what it is generating. " read 👉 www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-...
linkedin.com
What AI Actually Changes for the Working Bioinformatician
After watching and participating in developing several generations of tooling in biology, the honest question about AI and careers isn't whether the bioinformatician gets replaced. It's which part of the work changed, what the bioinformatician now had to understand, and what teaching has to change t
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Sequencing-free whole-genome spatial transcriptomics at single-molecule resolution www.cell.com/cell/fullte...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Just published: "What 1 year of Claude Code taught me". Check it out and subscribe to get everything I'm making. divingintogeneticsandgenomics.kit.com/posts/what-...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I've used Unix every single day for over a decade. Not because it's trendy — because nothing else lets a biologist move through data this fast. Here's what I'd tell anyone starting out.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Nothing in biology makes sense… journals.plos.org/ploscompbio...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
How to interpret a p-value histogram varianceexplained.org/statistics/...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Tired of squinting at columns that don't line up in the terminal? One small trick turns messy output into a clean, readable table.
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Reposted by Ming Tommy Tang
Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
1 of 290 in the field guide. Free 15-lesson sampler 👉 divingintogeneticsandgenomics.kit.com/wtdt_bioinf...
divingintogeneticsandgenomics.kit.com
What They Don't Teach You — Founding Waitlist
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
A tumour-derived organoid biobank maps cancer gene dependencies www.nature.com/articles/s4...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
How does multiple testing correction work? A practical example www.nature.com/articles/nb... Also, read my blog post on this topic divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/post/unders...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Unix pipes look like a beginner trick. Then it clicks: you can build an entire analysis without writing a single file to disk. Here's where the real power kicks in.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
A dependency map enhanced with next-generation 3D cancer models www.nature.com/articles/s4...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
🧵 Why the obsession with p < 0.05 is hurting science.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Your bash script "finished successfully" — and silently skipped half your samples. No error. No warning. Three lines at the top of every script stop this from ever happening.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
A compendium of next-generation patient-derived models for diverse cancers www.nature.com/articles/s4...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
1/ I used to re-explain my entire analysis setup to Claude Code every single conversation. My RNA-seq pipeline, my reference genome, my DESeq2 parameters. Every. Time. Then I set up a CLAUDE.md file. That problem is gone.
code.claude.com
Claude Code overview - Claude Code Docs
Claude Code is an agentic coding tool that reads your codebase, edits files, runs commands, and integrates with your development tools. Available in your terminal, IDE, desktop app, and browser.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
One awk one-liner I use constantly: filter one file by the keys in another. NR==FNR — the trick that joins BED / VCF / TSV files without ever loading them into R or Python.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The DNMT1 CXXC domain senses CpG islands for DNA methylation inhibition www.nature.com/articles/s4...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
🧵 RNA-seq Normalization: What You Need to Know
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Most bioinformatics "coding" is really 20 Unix commands you use every day. So I compiled 60 one-liner challenges that'll make you dangerous on the command line.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Spatial partitioning of NSD2 defines H3K36me2 as an active mark for repetitive sequence activation www.nature.com/articles/s4...
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Why is bioinformatics so hard? It's not the code. It's the biology. The tool runs in seconds — knowing whether the result is *real* is the whole job. That judgment is what no course teaches. It's why I wrote this book.
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Ming Tommy Tang @tommytang.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
GSEA is one of the highly cited methods (> 50K! ) for gene set enrichment analysis. Do you really understand it?
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