Editorial: Bioinformatics education in the 21st century

Bioinformatics competency has become a key element in much of contemporary biology. The increasing potential that is to be realized with modern technologies, such as 'next-generation' sequencing, parallel and 'cloud' computing, and continually increasing data banks, requires a fundamental understanding of bioinformatics concepts and applications. On par with the complexity of biological inquiry, acquiring bioinformatics competency can become a complex endeavor of undecipherable jargon, mathematics and frustration. The requirement for bioinformatics training affects the full range of budding biologists to seasoned professionals. This special issue stems from a personal desire to coalesce the most recent 'snapshot' of current activities in bioinformatics education, with the goal of providing a resource for biologists and bioinformatics educators alike. This special issue begins with a pair of articles that captures the current state of bioinformatics education. First, Cummings and Temple explore the opportunities and challenges generally faced in bio-informatics education. Then, Schneider et al. present a discussion of approaches for providing adequate training for bioinformatics services. Both articles contextualize their observations relative to pragmatic training experiences, which provide context for the breadth of obstacles faced by modern bioinformatics education. Together, these opening articles help set the stage for understanding the range of educational experiences and approaches that are the focus of the rest of the articles in this special issue. The importance of bioinformatics has underscored the value of common resources that are available to the scientific community at large. Leading the way in providing publicly available bioinformatics education support are the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the United States National Library of Medicine. Wright et al. describe the potential for 'eLearning' modalities to provide bioinfor-matics training, with specific attention to the resources available from the EBI. Cooper et al. then provide an overview of the bioinformatics education resources at the NCBI, introducing a newly redesigned Web-based portal to NCBI Educational resources. The next three articles explore the challenge of developing bioinformatics education approaches. Jungck et al. describe the BEDROCK project as an approach for supporting bioinformatics education, with a particular emphasis on undergraduate education. Appreciating that much of bioinformatics education must be pragmatic, Rother et al. describe 'multi-stage learning aids' as a way to provide detailed practical education on bioinformatics applications , such as PyMOL. Finally, Buttigieg presents a review of approaches for providing bioinformatics education that blends multimedia presentations, visual …