BECA bioinformatics

Today i will talk about an important resource right here in East Africa.

BECA is an acronym for biosciences east and central africa. It is an initiative endorsed by the New Partnership for Africa ’s Development (NEPAD) to support eastern and central African countries develop and apply bioscience research and expertise to produce technologies that help poor farmers secure their assets, improve their productivity and income and increase their market opportunities. It provides a focal point for the African scientific community to support the activities of national, regional, and international agencies as they address agriculturally related problems of the highest priority for alleviating poverty and promoting development.Its
i stole that paragraph from here , http://www.biosciencesafrica.org/about_BecA.htm

The geek part of BECA is the BECA computing platform whose resources you can access from here, http://www.becabioinfo.org/bbrweb/cms/front_content.php?idcat=17

If NCBI is giving you a headache and you want your fast, and you feel geeky, then you can try the Paracel blast.

Paracel Blast is an enhanced version of the NCBI BLAST source code optimised for use on clusters. Paracel BLAST enhancements are achieved without loss of accuracy, sensitivity, or selectivity. Optimum search time is obtained through searches automatically being parallelized, queued and scheduled using Platform LSF For more bioinfo geek stuff, try visiting that resource! and you can do it from home!

Genomics in East Africa

The annul East African young scientists Workshop took place in July at Morogoro Tanzania. This Workshop is organized by Dr Patrick Duffy and his collegues Dr Michal Fried, Prof Gwakisa and Dr Mutabingwa the MOMS project leader.

The theme for the workshop was on bioinformatics and genomics.

It is usually an excellent opportunity for young biomedical scientist to learn and network. As it has happened in previous workshops, we got to get to interact with senior and expiriencedd biomedical scientists from around the world. For the second time i served as a student and also as a facilitator and gave a talk on computational vaccinology or immunoinformatics

Among the faculty for this year were Dr Pete Bull, Dr Stephan Kappe,Dr Malcolm Gardener, Dr Peter Myler, Dr David Roos, etc. .

My major question at the end of the workshop was, is East Africa ready for the post genomic era? How adequate are our research institutes prepared to embrace these important technologies?
Are our politicians ready for it? or it is it still magic?

In Kenya we are going to the polls by the end of the year and am eagerly waiting to hear of a politician who will talk about embracing genomics and bioinformatics to push our medical and agricultural research to the next level. In Kenya the new buzz word is ICT (information communications technology) but talking of IT and computer technology in such a term is like talking of the planetary issues in terms of the galaxy! The term ICT is too generic and we need to decompose it to its disciplines and then tackle the challenges individually. Actually to a some politicians selling the Safaricom IPO is ICT so is computerizing the Nairobi stock exchange.

My point is, it is time to move our biological research to the next stage through actively spearheading efforts to integrate and foster capacity building in bioinformatics and genomics. These challenges need to be addressed by the government.

A Meeting with Owen White

Today i had an opportunity to sit, talk and discuss bioinformatics with none other than Dr Owen White. Owen is the Senior director of Bioinformatics at the former Tigr Institute. He gave an excellent talk on bioinformatics tools and pipelines, that his group have developed . I will be outlining them within the next few days.

Later in the day we talked about sematic web and web 2.0 hurabaroo and its applications in biology. Do these buzz words translate to practical problem solving in bioinformatics? 

Dr Owen says not in the sense that they are talked about. 

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