ISCB Newsletter 9-2

The Education column of PLoS Computational Biology was launched in January 2006 (see PLoS Comput Biol 2(1): e7.). The main goal of the column is to provide both practical and background information on important computational methods used to investigate interesting biological questions. A second goal is to provide information in the column that may be used at your institution for training others. Finally, we hope to stimulate widespread interest in an expanding field. To begin to meet these goals, we will focus initially on providing both historical reviews and tutorials.

The first contributed article, "Practical Strategies for Discovering Regulatory DNA Sequence Motifs", published in the April issue was written by Kenzie MacIsaac and Ernest Fraenkel. This work was inspired by a tutorial given by the authors at a Systems Biology meeting. The June 2006 issue contained an article written by Duncan Brown and Kimmen Sjölander titled "Functional classification using phylogenomic inference".

This was stimulated by ongoing research in their lab. The Education column is just taking shape and you are invited to contribute to it. The basic approach of an
article should be to motivate a topic and then provide sufficient background and information to enable someone to begin using this approach. I believe that the tutorials should concentrate on biological questions, followed by a discussion that covers the relevant computational tools to help answer those questions. A review for the Education column could be an historical perspective (e.g. the evolution of sequence searching methods or when is dynamic programming useful to apply to biological problems).

As for length, about 2000 words with 2 or 3 figures/tables is what we are aiming for. The goal is to keep the reader engaged so we don't want articles that are too long. Submitted manuscripts will be peer reviewed.

PLoS is an open access publisher and provides free, full text access worldwide. In addition, articles are archived in PubMed and PubMed Central. PLoS uses the Creative Commons Licensing Agreement that allows for reuse of our articles. So, when crafting courses or writing papers, you may take any and all bits of tutorials, articles, reviews, etc., and repurpose them as you wish.

If you have ideas for articles you'd like to contribute, please send e-mail to ploscompbiol_education@plos.org.

We look forward to hearing from you.