Cattley Sonia, Arthur Jonathan W
Sydney Bioinformatics, Medical Foundation Building (K25), The University of Sydney, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia.
Brief Bioinform. 2007 Nov;8(6):457-65. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbm039. Epub 2007 Aug 22.
The completion of the human genome project, and other genome sequencing projects, has spearheaded the emergence of the field of bioinformatics. Using computer programs to analyse DNA and protein information has become an important area of life science research and development. While it is not necessary for most life science researchers to develop specialist bioinformatic skills (including software development), basic skills in the application of common bioinformatics software and the effective interpretation of results are increasingly required by all life science researchers. Training in bioinformatics is increasingly occurring within the university system as part of existing undergraduate science and specialist degrees. One difficulty in bioinformatics education is the sheer number of software programs required in order to provide a thorough grounding in the subject to the student. Teaching requires either a well-maintained internal server with all the required software, properly interfacing with student terminals, and with sufficient capacity to handle multiple simultaneous requests, or it requires the individual installation and maintenance of every piece of software on each computer. In both cases, there are difficult issues regarding site maintenance and accessibility. In this article, we discuss the use of BioManager, a web-based bioinformatics application integrating a variety of common bioinformatics tools, for teaching, including its role as the main bioinformatics training tool in some Australian and international universities. We discuss some of the issues with using a bioinformatics resource primarily created for research in an undergraduate teaching environment.
人类基因组计划以及其他基因组测序项目的完成，引领了生物信息学领域的兴起。使用计算机程序分析DNA和蛋白质信息已成为生命科学研发的一个重要领域。虽然大多数生命科学研究人员无需具备专业的生物信息学技能（包括软件开发），但所有生命科学研究人员越来越需要具备应用常见生物信息学软件的基本技能以及有效解读结果的能力。作为现有本科理科和专业学位的一部分，生物信息学培训在大学系统中越来越普遍。生物信息学教育面临的一个难题是，为学生提供该学科全面基础所需的软件程序数量众多。教学要么需要一台维护良好的内部服务器，配备所有所需软件，与学生终端正确连接，并有足够能力处理多个同时请求，要么需要在每台计算机上单独安装和维护每一款软件。在这两种情况下，都存在有关站点维护和访问的难题。在本文中，我们讨论了BioManager（一种整合了多种常见生物信息学工具的基于网络的生物信息学应用程序）在教学中的使用，包括其在一些澳大利亚和国际大学中作为主要生物信息学培训工具的作用。我们还讨论了在本科教学环境中使用主要为研究而创建的生物信息学资源所涉及的一些问题。
