New course in bioinformatics

"The term bioinformatics was coined to describe the sequence information that was emerging from the new genome projects," says Professor Terri Attwood of University of Manchester and coordinator of the IST project EMBER. "It covered things like protein sequence analysis, DNA sequence analysis and protein structure analysis. The seed partners in EMBER were University of Manchester (UK) and The Netherlands-based Expert Centre for Taxonomic Identification (ETI). ETI were the technical developers of the learning resources."

Although there are trained biologists and computer scientists, there are very few computer-literate biologists or biology-literate computer scientists which are needed for this cross-disciplinary field. The shortage of trained bioinformatics professionals has been paralleled by a shortage of suitable training courses.

The University of Manchester has been running a M.Sc. in Bioinformatics since 1999. It includes a set of practical activities in a package called BioActivity, which had been made freely available and used in training courses worldwide. Maintaining such a course is surprisingly time consuming, with updates, revisions, hyperlink checking, and so on. EMBER was set up to convert BioActivity into a commercial product that could be maintained by technical publishers.

There are three components to EMBER: a more up-to-date and professionally produced website; a stand-alone version of the materials on CD-ROM, and a book that accompanies the course. The course is publicly available on the project website, and a simple password system is used to keep track of who is using it. "This enables course coordinators to manage presentations of the course and student cohorts, and enables students to login to the correct version of the course," adds Attwood.

"We have between 20-40 students taking the M.Sc. in bioinformatics every year," comments Attwood. "Although it's difficult to give precise figures for the numbers of students in other institutions, we know that EMBER is being used in Finland, Switzerland, Portugal, Belgium to name just a few. The University of Manchester is in discussion with two of the project partners with a view to extend the collaboration beyond the end of the project. I expect that take-up will be good."

Contact:

Professor Terri Attwood
School of Biological Sciences
University of Manchester
M13 9PL Manchester
United Kingdom
Tel: +44-161-2755766
Email: attwood@bioinf.man.ac.uk

Source: Based on information from EMBER