The design and implementation of software tools to facilitate learning in bioinformatics

Bioinformatics has been evolved into a critical inter-disciplinary field that benefits studies in both molecular biology and computer science. On the one hand, it grants the possibility to comprehend biological information and process in a more effective and efficient way by employing computational technologies to extracting knowledge from dense amounts of intermixed biological data; on the other hand, it provides a new and complex domain for researching advanced algorithms and techniques for data analysis. Nevertheless, bioinformatics also poses a great challenge to grasp for both computer science and biology majors due to its interdisciplinary and advanced natures. The major difficulties for biology students lie in the understanding of computational logic behind those bioinformatics tools; whereas computer science students may have hard time to comprehend related biologic information and processes. As an effort to smooth the learning curve, we launch a project that aims to build a suite of software tools with interactive features to facilitate the learning of different topics in bioinformatics. In this paper, we introduce two software tools we build on gene prediction and sequence alignments as our initial outcomes of the project.