Bioinformatics plays an essential role in the advances made in modern biology. However this still young discipline needs to address critical issues in order to fully support life scientists in their investigations.
This survey targeted members of the life-science community and was conducted from October 2010 to June 2011. A total of 165 responses were collected.
e-Infrastructures
The development of e-infrastructures is part of the European priorities defined by the FP7 ICT Work Programme 2011-2012.
e-Infrastructures are essential to sustain advances in technology and science in all research domains. They empower global virtual research community with a new research environment, enabling e-science, and fostering innovation-based industries.
In Life-sciences, e-infrastructures play a fundamental role, as they support bioinformatics development and use. Several e-infrastructure projects are under progress: ELIXIR, IMPACT and e-NMR.
Response frequency = % of answering respondents (n=129)
Nevertheless, 47.3% of the answering respondents (n = 129) to the survey do not consider that the development of e-infrastructures is a priority in bioinformatics.
New methods and programs
There is a constant need for new bioinformatics methods and programs to address current and upcoming challenges (seeMoore JH et al., Bioinformatics challenges for genome-wide association studies, 2010) of modern biology. The wide spread of high throughput technologies, the critical need for bioinformatics resources interoperability, the fast rising of new technologies and emerging fields that generate new type of data, etc. create demands for new bioinformatics developments.
Response frequency = % of answering respondents (n= 140)
This requirement for new development in bioinformatics resources appears to be well perceived by most (75.7%) of the answering respondents (n = 140).
Use of data standards
Development of standards for biological data and metadata representation is critical to cope with the interoperability principle of bioinformatics resources (i.e. databases and tools). Global initiatives (such as HUPO PSI, MSI, FuGE, etc.) have already led to several data standards (MIAME, MIACA, MIFlowCyt, MIAPAR, etc.) which are now commonly recognized and used by the world wide bioinformatics community including proprietary software companies (e.g. Agilent and Illumina).
Response frequency = % of answering respondents (n= 149)
The use of data standards is consensually (84.6% of answering respondents) perceived as a priority by the survey respondents (n = 149).
Development of bioinformatics initial and continuing education?
Bioinformatics knowledge diffusion is a central issue for the advanced development and use of bioinformatics resources. There is a lack of bioinformaticians, bioinformatics courses are not systematically incorporated across biology curriculi and the offer for bioinformatics continuing education is too poor in comparison to the current demand,(Schneider MV, Watson J, Attwood T, et al., 2010).
The high speed development of bioinformatics creates an additional challenge for keeping bioinformatics developers and users up to date.
Response frequency = % of answering respondents (n= 144)
Increasing bioinformatics diffusion knowledge is thought to be a priority for 79.2% of the answering respondents (n = 144).
Better and more frequent interactions between developers and users?
One of the challenges in bioinformatics is the lack of interaction between developers and users (i.e. end-users). This may vary from one life sciences domain to another, but in general there are few occasions that bring together bioinformaticians and experimental biologists together. Differences in their scientific culture as well as vision of biological data account, in part, for this situation. This is really unfortunate, since when the two communities establish tight relationships and work together (e.g. GEN2PHEN project), it results in better advances in both bioinformatics and biology domains.
Response frequency = % of answering respondents (n=. 143)
Increasing the quality and number of interactions between developers and users, is also considered as a top priority by 86.7% of the answering respondents (n = 143).
In Conclusion, the survey results strongly support that current priorities in bioinformatics associate method and technology development with trans-disciplinary efforts. The top 3 priorities according to these results are the endorsement of data standard (84.6% of answering respondents), the strengthening of bioinformatics knowledge within life science community (79.2% of the answering respondents) and the creation of tighter relationships between developers and users (86.7% of the answering respondents).
Acknowledgement
SP-Consulting is thankful to all the online and mailing list respondents for their participation in this survey.
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