Introductory Course in Bioinformatics in Kenya

Etienne de Villiers

EMBnet BecA-ILRI, Nairobi, Kenya

The BecA-ILRI Hub, EMBnet specialist node in Kenya hosted the third “Introductory course in Bioinformatics” between 4-9th May 2009 at ILRI, Nairobi, Kenya. The course team consisted of: Dr. Etienne de Villiers (BecA- ILRI Hub); Dr. Erik Bongcam-Rudloff, Dr. Hans-Henrik Fuxelius and Katharina Truve from Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Uppsala University (UU) and Linnaeus Centre for Bioinformatics (LCB); and George Githinji (KEMRI-Wellcome Trust program).

In total 25 applicants from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa were selected from 152 applications. Eight travel fellowships were awarded to participants from Tanzania and Uganda . These fellowships were made possible with generous funding from Prof. Anna Tramontano from University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy and the BecA-ILRI Hub. The main funding was from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) (www.sida.se), Sweden. An additional 22 students from the University of Khartoum, Faculty of Animal Production in Sudan participated online in the course using the EMBnet Internet video conferencing system.

Course participants and teachers.

The response from the “online” participants was positive and we will use this medium in future courses. All students received an eBioUSB, a Bioinformatics workbench on a USB memory stick, which contains all the basic bioinformatics tools taught during the course and that enable students to save their data on the same device. The course was favorably evaluated, with 4.4 out of maximum 5 points.

Lots of positive comments were received about the course. Some of these comments were: “a very powerful tool”, “We highly appreciate it”, “Good course and teachers”.