“Bioinformatics has become such an integral part of research. And being able to do this, to use these tools in an informed way and in a way that’s somewhat discerning . . . is really important,” explains Cheryl Kerfeld, director of the Genomics and Bioinformatics Education Program at the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute (JGI). “There’s no reason we cannot start doing this at the undergraduate level.”Kerfeld developed a system at JGI that gives educators, especially those at smaller liberal arts colleges and with smaller research programs, the resources to teach and manage labs in which students annotate newly sequenced bacterial genomes. About 286 instructors from 136 institutions have implemented the program, called Integrated Microbial Genomes Annotation Collaboration Toolkit (IMG-ACT), Kerfeld says.
Read the full story at The Scientist magazine