PI Langmead co-authored a review describing how Bioinformatics training, with the assistance of cloud computing and open data in particular, can enhance STEM research in limited-resource countries and Universities. It appeared in Nature Biotechnology today. The review was primarily the work of Serghei Mangul and Lana Martin at UCLA.

A trend highlighted here is the increasing availability of processed (i.e., summarized) versions of genomics datasets, e.g. in recount2 or gnomAD. These provide new ‘on-ramps’ for bioinformatics trainees to get started with large, powerful datasets, while bypassing the more onerous steps of downloading the raw data (perhaps over very limited internet uplinks), processing it from scratch (on limited computational resources), etc.

The review includes interesting statistics about how many students in different countries are taking Bioinformatics courses on the Coursera platform, including our Algorithms for DNA Sequencing course (see Supplementary Info).