# How much can ChatGPT really help Computational Biologists in Programming?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09126 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09126/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07814/) (2022)
- [Mathematical Capabilities of ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13867/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Capability Analysis of GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 Series Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10420/) (2023)
- [A Categorical Archive of ChatGPT Failures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03494/) (2023)
- [A Tutorial on Principal Component Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.1100/) (2014)
- [An Analysis of the Automatic Bug Fixing Performance of ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08653/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT Prompt Patterns for Improving Code Quality, Refactoring, Requirements Elicitation, and Software Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07839/) (2023)
- [One Small Step for Generative AI, One Giant Leap for AGI: A Complete Survey on ChatGPT in AIGC Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06488/) (2023)
- [A large-scale study on research code quality and execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12793/) (2021)
- [An Introduction to Programming for Bioscientists: A Python-based Primer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05419/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

ChatGPT, a recently developed product by openAI, is successfully leaving its mark as a multi-purpose natural language based chatbot. In this paper, we are more interested in analyzing its potential in the field of computational biology. A major share of work done by computational biologists these days involve coding up bioinformatics algorithms, analyzing data, creating pipelining scripts and even machine learning modeling and feature extraction. This paper focuses on the potential influence (both positive and negative) of ChatGPT in the mentioned aspects with illustrative examples from different perspectives. Compared to other fields of computer science, computational biology has - (1) less coding resources, (2) more sensitivity and bias issues (deals with medical data) and (3) more necessity of coding assistance (people from diverse background come to this field). Keeping such issues in mind, we cover use cases such as code writing, reviewing, debugging, converting, refactoring and pipelining using ChatGPT from the perspective of computational biologists in this paper.