Bioinformatics in Africa: Part2 - Kenya
International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI):
Under a NEPAD initiative, the Biosciences Eastern and Central Africa (BECA) (www.biosciencesafrica.org) was established at ILRI. BECA consists of a hub, regional nodes, and other affiliated laboratories and partner institutes. A state of the art joint Bioinformatics Platform (www.becabioinfo.org), whose overall goal is to provide a coherent and powerful bioinformatics infrastructure for use by all scientists in East and central Africa. The Platform goal requires both physical and intellectual developments that together provide researchers with access to diverse infrastructure in a widearea network, thereby addressing four important aspects of bioinformatics:
1) Science: bioinformatics tools for data integration and visualization, standardization of data formats and data analysis strategies, and distribution of analysis tasks over local and widearea networks are in development;
2) Bioinformatics Support Facility: provides assistance and custom programming to projects and those unable to establish a bioinformatics support function intrinsic to their project due to shortage of qualified personnel or lack of funding;
3) Hardware Platform: provide a powerful high performance computing platform capable of handling the largest analysis needs for projects;
4) Bioinformatics Training for East and central African scientists: While many Webbased tools are available to the wetlab researcher, the Web is not well suited for tasks beyond singlesequence annotation. Researchers need to become productive in a serverbased Unix environment with its wealth of scripting and automation tools. Even at an entrylevel, this can be an intimidating task if proper guidance is not available.
International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE): ICIPE’s research focus is on insect biology, in order to improve the wellbeing of the peoples of the tropics through insect science. There is a commitment to utilise contemporary science in order to limit the impact of disease vectors, and agricultural pests. The understanding of the mechanisms associated with behaviour (e.g. attraction and repellency) is crucial. ICIPE seeks to enhance its bioinformatics capacity in order to support data from various EST projects designed to gain insights into the insect ecology and plant pathogen interactions though studies of metabolic pathways associated with production of all elochemicals.
Longterm training activities:
Kenyatta University: An introductory course in Bioinformatics is offers to MSc Biotechnology students. This comprises of 35 hours of lectures and practicals.
University of Nairobi: A centre for Biotechnology and Bioinformatics (CEBIB), which will offer postgraduate training (diplomas, MSc and PhD) in areas of biotechnology and bioinformatics has recently been launched. Other universities in Kenya, including Egerton, Maseno and the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology offer introductory courses to undergraduates in biomedical sciences. In addition, under the BECA platform MSc and PhD fellowships are being made available for Bioinformatics students. ILRI is forging links with Universities in South Africa and the United Kingdom to provide access to courses and training material.
Research Interest and Activities:
The following are the present areas of research interest: 1. EST clustering 2. Genome sequencing and annotation 3. Functional genomics and proteomics (including key tropical pathogens) 4. Structural bioinformatics 5. Development of Bioinformatics Data Management Systems 6. Gene Mining 7. High Throughput Genotyping 8. Microarray data management and analysis 9. Metagenomics 10. Immunoinformatics 11. Hostpathogen interaction 12. High performance computing and grid development 13. Parasite transfection technologies 14. Cell cycle regulation 15. Population genetics 16. Vector genomics 17. Drug, vaccine and diagnostic target discovery
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