Transdisciplinary Approach for Bioinformatics Education in Southern Brazil

Marcio Dorn,Hugo Verli,Rodrigo Ligabue-Braun

doi:10.3389/feduc.2021.725591

Abstract

The development and application of bioinformatics has been growing steadily, but its learning and training has been lagging. We have approached this problem through a bi-annual event, called EGB (Escola Gaúcha de Bioinformática), dedicated to undergraduate and graduate students (mainly from biology, biomedicine, chemistry, physics, and computer sciences), as well as professionals, to mingle and be presented to bioinformatics from sequence, structure, and computational standpoints simultaneously. The interactive environment provided by EGB allows for participants mingling, independently from their training background, fostering collaborative learning and experience exchange. Both lecturers and students are encouraged to collaborate and communicate, with no formal acknowledgement of “status differentiation”.

Highlights

Bioinformatics can be defined as as the “application of tools of computation and analysis to the capture and interpretation of biological data” (Bayat, 2002)
Different strategies to consolidate bioinformatics as part of the main curriculum of different courses, especially in the biological sciences, have been proposed through the years. These include the definition of its core competencies (Welch et al, 2014), its defining elements (Tapprich et al, 2021), the inspection of successful teaching cases in the US and United Kingdom (Hack and Kendall, 2005), the need to go beyond traditional classroom short courses (Atwood et al, 2019), and the analysis of a dedicated learning module of bioinformatics for biology students (Madlung, 2018)
In order to show explicitly the combination of technical fields that make up this fast-paced field, we decided that, during the EGB, the transdisciplinarity should be presented as a living experience, bringing together participants from the multiple backgrounds that encompass the definition of bioinformatics

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Bioinformatics can be defined as as the “application of tools of computation and analysis to the capture and interpretation of biological data” (Bayat, 2002). Contrasting with its array of definitions, there is no contending that bioinformatics has been steadily growing, both in its use and as a research field, at least since the early 2000s (Hodcroft et al, 2021; Wilson Sayres et al, 2018; Brusic, 2007; Perez-Iratxeta et al, 2007) This lack of agreement reflects the quick paced development of an evolving discipline whose target is not well defined yet. This lack of a settled focus is one of the major problems in teaching Bioinformatics: despite bioinformatics’ half-century history (Gauthier et al, 2019), its learning and teaching seem to be trailing behind its observed growth and use (Hack and Kendall, 2005; Wilson Sayres et al, 2018). Encompassing three editions so far of the Escola Gaúcha de Bioinformática (EGB), or “Southernmost Brazilian School of Bioinformatics” in a free translation, such model has been applied with variations in Brazil since the 1980s through multiple fields, such as physics, chemistry, molecular simulation and others, and has been able to offer a generational impact on the formation of highly qualified researchers

Background

Findings

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT