World Citizens - DePaul University

sequence DNA and analyze other biological data, and many other
programs specifically tailored to the researchers’ projects.
“Computer scientists have their own unique vocabulary, so it’s really
important to have students immersed in an environment with biologists,
who think and work in an entirely different way,” says Angulo.
“Bioinformatics is about merging the two
outlooks, training computer-savvy students to
be able to fill biologists’ needs.”
“Sometimes at first, we’d talk past each
other,” Westneat says. “But as the weeks
pass, lingo is picked up on both ends, and
we find solutions to problems. There’s a lot
of very useful programs for researchers that
simply haven’t been written yet.”
Angulo also has addressed the occasional
communication issue with his students.
“We’re encouraging them to make Flash
movies to show how their software is working,”
he says. “We’ve found that works much
better than technical jargon.”
But according to Richard Ree, a botanist
at The Field Museum who also is working
with the students, the benefit of the program
can’t be one-sided.
“We try to come up with projects that
captivate the students, as well,” Ree says.
“We don’t want them doing simply data-entry
work, we want them to be able to contribute
and write programs that reach consensus
and provide confidence in the results.”
Westneat concurs, noting that in many
cases, the research couldn’t get done without
the programs written by the DePaul students.
“The projects we choose are all new, thus
making a novel contribution to the biological
sciences,” he says. “Even though some of the
computational approaches we are using are
well known, we are still combining things in
new ways.”
Angulo explains that the project is a perfect fit for the nascent
sequence of bioinformatics course offerings at CTI, which combine a
technology skill set with scientific know-how.
“Bioinformatics is a large and rapidly growing field, and our students
primarily come from computer science backgrounds, but they also want
“ Most biologists
are fairly nonintuitive
when it
to understand biology, biochemistry and pharmacology,” he says.
“This sort of project is exactly the type of experience that employers in
the industry want to see.”
comes to computers.
I can imagine a
computational tool
that I could use,
but I’d have no
idea how to create
and implement it.”
Mark Westneat
Zoology Curator, The Field Museum
The project has shown “excellent” progress so far, according to all
parties involved. One of the most recent prototype applications, Westneat
says, will help analyze the evolutionary tree for
many different species of coral-reef fish. Angulo
noted that future projects may include principles
of artificial intelligence, although currently
most of the software being written “would
classify as graph-generating programs.”
Eventually, Westneat believes that the
type of work that the DePaul students are doing
can help biologists research more topics in
quicker fashion.
“There’s a huge need for new software
tools that operate on a large scale to analyze
different populations of data,” he says.
“Anything we develop is open-access, so flexible
computational tools that operate in a common
scientific language and provide access to
information are really valuable to us.”
According to Ree, the proliferation of
databases in genomics and proteomics research
in recent years has further defined the necessity
for such tools.
“There’s so much more information out
there in our field, so there’s a need for more
computational power to deal with it all.”
However, given the vast, nearly unlimited
combinations of biological life on the planet,
how do researchers and students keep projects
manageable?
“It can be difficult,” Westneat acknowledges.
“But there are almost always little pieces
of the grand puzzle of the tree of life that can
be developed as a short-term project. Imagine it
as someone programming a huge project like
Google Earth. That’s a massive undertaking, but you have one programmer
focusing on the roads and images for Illinois, which is far more
manageable… but the thing to remember is that asking scientific
questions about the biodiversity of life is so important right now.”
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