A Proposed Undergraduate Bioinformatics Curriculum for Computer Scientists

Bioinformatics is a new and rapidly evolving discipline that has emerged from the fields of experimental molecular biology and biochemistry, and from the the artificial intelligence, database, and algorithms disciplines of computer science. Largely because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of bioinformatics research, academia has been slow to respond to strong industry and government demands for trained scientists to develop and apply novel bioinformatics techniques to the rapidly-growing, freely-available repositories of genetic and proteomic data. While some institutions are responding to this demand by establishing graduate programs in bioinformatics, the entrance barriers for these programs are high, largely due to the significant amount of prerequisite knowledge in the disparate fields of biochemistry and computer science required to author sophisticated new approaches to the analysis of bioinformatics data. We present a proposal for an undergraduate-level bioinformatics curriculum in computer science that lowers these barriers.