Infrastructural Needs and Capacity Building in Bioinformatics for Sustainable Development in Developing Countries

摘要

Bioinformatics is the field dedicated mainly to the development and use of computational methods and tools for the understanding of biological data and information, and holds great promise for poverty alleviation and disease control. Developed countries have invested generously in the research and development of bioinformatics. Developing countries must follow suite. These countries should setup the infrastructure for the research and development of bioinformatics and related areas. To achieve this, some of the steps, actions and the required resources are: ⅰ) availability of vast DNA information in the public databases, ⅱ) a number of computational tools freely available either on-line or as an open source, ⅲ) to train human resource and capacity building, ⅳ) setting up of bioinformatics resource facilities, and ⅴ) collaboration with developed countries. In this paper we describe the need and the required actions to motivate bioinformatics research and development in the developing countries.