These are two exemplar papers from the Oncinfo Lab, which illustrate the extend of biology and machine learning you need to know to be successful here as a PhD student. The bars are lower for MSc studnets and higher for postdocs.

1- If you want to join Oncinfo as a PhD student, you should be able to understand at least 15% of the following paper at the time you join. By the time you graduate, you should be able to read such a paper in 3 days and understand at least 70%.

Sun, Wenyan, et al. “Pathogenic tau-induced piRNA depletion promotes neuronal death through transposable element dysregulation in neurodegenerative tauopathies.” Nature neuroscience 21.8 (2018): 1038. [pdf ]

2- During your PhD, you should write at least 2 papers like the following. You are expected to perform >90% of the data analysis including method development and in silico experiments, and write >80% of the text.

Foroushani, Amir, et al. “Large-scale gene network analysis reveals the significance of extracellular matrix pathway and homeobox genes in acute myeloid leukemia: an introduction to the Pigengene package and its applications.” BMC medical genomics 10.1 (2017): 16.