En varios países de América Latina, y particularmente en Colombia, todavía nos falta dar grandes pasos en bioinformática, para aparecer en el mapa mundial del área.
Recientemente EMBL-EBI junto con algunos "socios" en América Latina lanzaron el proyecto
CABANA, que da pasos adecuados para mejorar el entrenamiento en Bioinformática en la región.
Algunos investigadores españoles no están de acuerdo con la motivación de CABANA (en mi opinión, algo errado. Necesitamos mas esfuerzos como CABANA). El Dr. Marco Cristancho, Ex-Director del Centro Colombiano de Bioinformática y Biología Computacional, escribió una respuesta a los comentarios del grupo español, y me permitió compartirla, aquí la dejo para ustedes.
I carefully read the so-called ´criticism´ of the recent launched program CABANA, addressed to improve Bioinformatics and ´omics´ sciences in Latin-American (LA), and I have some comments about the statements on the writing:
The people commenting on the project, who wrote a review paper about Bioinformatics developments in the region, are based in Spain not LA, we wonder if they contacted anybody from LA countries to write together that review to have a first-hand view of developments in LA. In their review, they come to the not surprisingly conclusion that this field of research “should still develop twice to approach the average world scientific production in the field” showing the slow implementation of Bioinformatics that wants to address CABANA. I disagree with that statement, Bioinformatics and Genomics have to grow to a 4 or 5 times current rate to have any particular meaning in LA science developments, as I will manifest in the next paragraphs.
Authors mentioned that SolBio is a strong organization composed of 400+ scientists in the region (19 countries). That number is probably close to the number of scientists working on Bioinformatics in NYC, Boston, California (any city), or any major city in Europe. That is a case to say that Bioinformatics is far from going strong in LA. Authors do not mentioned a single world-recognized group from LA that leads the field. There are several countries in the region where developments in Genomics and Bioinformatics is close to zero, just check Universities curriculums and programs in research centres to realize that.
Several SolBio members were contacted to be part of this initiative. In fact, there are members of the society that lead the program in their countries. For a project like this, the effort to include everybody in such a vast region with so many countries is immense. However, we tried to contact leading scientists from these fields in every country in LA. We had to exclude scientists from Chile and Uruguay, because they are out of the ODA list of low and middle-income countries, a requirement to be included in the proposal. We sent mails to 50+ leading scientists in LA countries. As usually happens with we Latin people, most of those mails were unanswered. Several colleagues who answered did not have the time to participate in the initiative even when we needed very little information from them at the time of writing the proposal, we needed just their willing to participate.
Just to give you another example of the little importance of research in these areas in LA; as the article mentioned, the project was conceived for the first time in Colombia, however, at the time of this writing no Institute from the country has come forward to be the leader of the initiative and there has not been major interest in the project in several leading Institutes where the project has been presented. Another example, Colombia launched a Bioinformatics research centre BIOS, to our knowledge unique in the region given the fact that it is an independent Institute not linked to any University or major Research Centre. BIOS has been financed by the government and after about three years of functioning is been dismantled for bioinformatics research with no great concern from the scientific community.
Most of those doing Bioinformatics and Genomics in LA are involved in small projects. Several countries in the region are rich in biodiversity; but you just have to check any database with molecular data to realize that the number of species having any data at all is very small. Only Colombia harbours around 30.000 plant species in its territory, no more than 2.000 of those are represented in the databases and the scenario is the same for the rest of the countries. What is worst? Over 60% of that data have been collected by groups based in the US, Japan or Europe with no involvement whatsoever from LA scientists. Only México and Brazil have got involved in projects for the sequencing of a few plants and animals of their biodiversity. To my knowledge, there are no major projects in the region to mass sequence species from any biological group (humans included) as it is happening in other regions of the world.
I understand and agree that molecular and other sensitive data has to be treated with caution and any biodiversity study in our countries has to be conducted in a sustainable and responsible way. But there is a great deal of ignorance of that biodiversity and I don´t think that having it “untouched” and “undiscovered” is a proper way of protecting it. If we in LA collect molecular data from our species we will decisively have a strong defence in future scenarios to protect those species that can be used for industrial purposes. Otherwise we face the current picture where we take very little advantage of that biodiversity and instead some companies in other countries still use it for their commercial developments.
It is true that the project seems to be of a small scope but as we mentioned we did not get answer from many people to participate in the proposal and research in the region is concentrated in only few countries, Brazil, México, Chile, and Argentina. We have the current aim of including additional research groups in our proposal, which should start on October 1st. We know about the DEANN project, a similar initiative led by Spain and other European countries (http://bioinfo.cipf.es/deann/?page_id=18), with the aim of developing a NGS network in the region. That project only includes those 4 countries and I wonder if scientists from other LA countries were invited.
Unfortunately LA is not well recognized by science investments, efforts and developments. It is hard to do research in a region where bureaucracy, corruption and politicians short-sighted view of science does not allow for a proper environment for scientific endeavours. I do strongly think that DEANN, CABANA and other efforts to strengthen Bioinformatics, Genomics and other scientific areas in Latin America are urgently needed. Those initiatives were borne with the purpose of improving science in the region and trying to conduct scientific collaborations between LA countries, something that is extremely rare but very much needed.
Marco-Aurelio Cristancho, PhD
Bioinformatics Advocate for Latin America
