There seems to be wide agreement within both industry and academia that there are not enough scientists adequately trained in bioinformatics or computational biology. This sentiment stems principally from the difficulties in finding employees, graduate students and post-docs with appropriate skills for joining research and/or development teams in this field. The recent drain of academics into industry threatens to reduce our ability to provide the training needed to meet the demand of the job markets. An obvious question is “What is the proper curriculum for bioinformatics professionals?” At first, the idea of defining a curriculum for bioinformatics may seem premature. The very definition of bioinformatics is still the matter of some debate. Although some interpret it narrowly as the information science techniques needed to support genome analysis, many have begun to use it synonymously with “computational molecular biology” or even all of “computational biology.” For this discussion of curriculum, bioinformatics addresses problems related to the storage, retrieval and analysis of information about biological structure, sequence and function.
