Early Requirement for Bioinformatics in Undergraduate Biology Curricula

Abstract

As the world unravels its most impactful event of the century so far – the COVID-19 pandemic, billions of people turn on televisions, tune into radios, and browse websites trying to understand what the epidemiologic graphs are saying; and in most cases, they turn to media and friends asking to explain what these graphs mean. The COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed: there are huge gaps in the ability for the general population to interpret statistical analyses and graphical representation of biological data (Andrew, 2020; Leybzon, 2020; Tracy, 2020). In the current situation, understanding data being a prerogative for only data specialists is gone; every health care professional, biologist, chemist, or any natural scientist have taken on the responsibility for the evaluation of massive amount of the pandemic data and delivering the conclusions to their friends and families. But are we really prepared for such work and responsibility? As classically trained in US biologists, we were never required by undergraduate college programs to dive deep into the quantitative analysis world (Cheesman et al., 2007). We were dealing with enzyme kinetics graphs in biochemistry, but not once did we touch “big data”–with exception to some of our friends who were brave enough to enroll into a biostatistics class as an elective. Only later, in graduate school, some had an opportunity to take bioinformatics courses such as computational biology, systems biology, or statistical programming. Today, there is enough data generated by sequencing, gene expression, bench work on DNA, proteins, and metabolites, thus bioinformaticians have plenty of work to do in phylogenetics, gene expression analysis, genome analysis or an interactome prediction (Hagen, 2000; Gauthier et al., 2019). Many of bioinformaticians either have a computer science background or learned computational analysis in their graduate programs. With the overwhelming amount of data that is available today on any topic, including ecology, biodiversity, epidemiology, we believe that all biologists should receive mandatory training in bioinformatics during their undergraduate years, just as they receive training in organic chemistry or physics. For almost two decades, it has been documented that there is need for undergraduate life science majors to graduate with competency in bioinformatics to help not only scientific progression, but students’ careers as well (Bialek and Botstein, 2004; Pevzner and Shamir, 2009; Levine, 2014; American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2015; Sayres et al., 2018), with attempts to implement data science across life sciences curriculum (Dill-McFarland et al., 2021). However, there are still barriers preventing successful inclusion of bioinformatics into undergraduate life sciences education, including lack of student interest, overly full curricula, lack of student preparation, and faculty members belonging to underrepresented groups (Williams et al., 2019). Here, we discuss our opinions and experiences regarding the inclusion of bioinformatics early in undergraduate life science curricula at Kean University, a Hispanic-serving Institution (HSI). Courses that cover bioinformatics skills should be offered as early as sophomore year, immediately after students complete two semesters of general biology courses and introductory Edited by: Hugo Verli, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil