Preface: 2 nd Satellite Meeting on Bioinformatics Education,Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB-BE 2010)

This issue contains articles from the second RECOMB satellite meeting on bioinformatics education (RECOMB-BE), which took place in University of California, San Diego on May 2010. We initiated the meeting series in 2009 because we felt that, as the bioinformatics discipline matures, it needs to improve its didactic side, and we believed that a meeting of bioinformatics educators would provide all of us with ideas on what is best to teach and how to teach it better. For more details on the meeting, please visit the following website: http://casb.ucsd.edu/bioed10/

Another motivation for the meeting series was the shortage of appropriate bioinformatics courses that are aimed at biology students. While bioinformatics is maturing and becoming an inseparable part of biology, most biology undergraduates—and probably most graduates as well—are not exposed to the rich ideas of modern bioinformatics. They may learn how to use some of the popular bioinformatics tools in a cookbook-style class, but these “how to” classes do not explore in detail the conceptual ideas from mathematics, computer science, and statistics that underlie these tools. This shortcoming will not prepare them to be future researchers in biology, able to suggest computational goals, deviate from standard tools, and communicate effectively with the professional bioinformaticians that will be needed in their teams. Nor will they be able to collaborate efficiently with their computational colleagues. For more on the need to change the biology curriculum, see Pevzner and Shamir (“Computing Has Changed Biology—Biology Education Must Catch Up,” Science 325, 541–542, 2009).

The bioinformatics education conference was organized as an imitation of the classroom experience. Rather than talking about education, we invited speakers to present a classroom-like presentation that they would give to senior undergraduate or to junior graduate students. Other parts of the conference included bioinformatics posters from undergraduate and first-year graduate students presenting original research, as well as panels of educators on pertinent questions. We were gratified by the amount of interest in the meetings and intend to continue the series in the future.

The RECOMB-BE conference series was supported by Howard Hughes Medical Institute and CalIT at University of California San Diego.

A natural complement to the oral presentations presented at the meeting, we believed, would be well-organized and detailed written material that is designed for use in the classroom by educators and students. We were delighted that several of the speakers agreed to our invitation and wrote full manuscripts with this goal in mind. All articles published in this special issue have undergone refereeing according to the usual standards of the Journal of Computational Biology. We view the inclusion of high-quality educational material in a cornerstone journal of bioinformatics as more proof of the coming of age of our discipline.