Plug gap in essential bioinformatics skills

Abstract

Unjustified killing of badgers in Kyushu An ecological crisis is unfolding on Kyushu Island, Japan. Thousands of Japanese badgers (Meles anakuma) are being culled illegally without scientific advice or strategic planning. We urge the government to intervene and work with ecologists to establish whether this increase in culling is warranted. Justified culls should then be planned, regulated, monitored for effectiveness and subjected to animal-welfare controls (see Nature 543, 18-19; 2017). Badgers are protected under Japanese law. Typically, some 200 are legally culled every year in Kyushu's Kagoshima prefecture to prevent crop destruction. But, inexplicably, local farmers killed 4,000 badgers last year. And because the Japanese name for badger-anaguma-is a generic term for all face-masked mesocarnivores, species such as raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides viverrinus) and raccoons (Procyon lotor) are also being exterminated. To encourage farmers to deal with problem animals, the local authorities offer the equivalent of US$25 for each badger tail or each carcass photographed. Locals therefore stand to profit from the culling. Another factor could be the trend for exotic bush meat in exclusive Tokyo restaurants. In our view, formal regulation of this culling is essential. Proper meat controls are also needed to prevent food poisoning and the spread of parasitic infections to humans.

Big Data: Challenge and Opportunity for Translational and Industrial Research in Healthcare

“…Clinicians should be prepared to handle data collected either horizontally from a large number of individuals, or vertically from granular, high resolution, multi-parameters analyses of a single individual (or few). In both cases all the caveats and challenges of big data hold (Brazas et al, 2017) and are similar to those encountered in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. IoT is described as a network of electronic devices equipped with software, sensors, and connectivity used to collect data for many purposes.…”

“…Without necessarily transforming themselves into bioinformaticians, biomedical researchers have to make a cultural shift embracing a new domain of "infobiology" (Brazas et al, 2017). As a consequence, the many flavors of bioinformatics and computational biology skills are now a must-have in the technologically advanced research laboratories or R&D departments: companies and research institutions, as well as single laboratories, should also promote and organize computationally skilled personnel (Chang, 2015;Bartlett et al, 2017).…”

Linking Educational Resources on Data Science

“…There has been a sustained interest in applying semantic web technologies to model educational resources, as seen by early vision papers, such as Bourda and Doan (2003) which proposed a semantic web for learning resources using an RDF schema version of the IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard, journal special issues (Anderson and Whitelock 2004), survey papers (Aroyo and Dicheva 2004;Dietze et al 2013;Pereira et al 2018), and the recent ISWC 2015 LINKed EDucation workshop. Other educational resource collection efforts include ELIXIR Training e-Support System (tess.elixir-europe.org), GOBLET (Brazas, Blackford, and Attwood 2017), and the Open Educational Resources Commons (oercommons.org). Our project shares many of the same goals of these previous efforts.…”

Biotechnological and Digital Revolution for Climate-Smart Plant Breeding

“…There is an urgent need for early training in bioinformatic skills in order to empower plant researchers and breeders to make use of their own data (i.e., for analysis and interpretation) [150]. However, to identify those who are adept at both bioinformatics and plant breeding is difficult and not trivial.…”