Bioinformatics skills are paramount to all life science professionals: however many do not have the time to leave their research projects and focus on long training programs to gain these new skills. As a consequence there is a need for short-duration, intensive professional bioinformatics training programs.

This need is coupled with another challenge faced in acquiring bioinformatics skills; life science researchers now need to be both skilled in biology and an information sciences, and many biologists are uncomfortable moving into computing and statistics, a requirement to be a proficient bioinformatician.

The need for information science skills and specialised bioinformatics skills has posed a serious challenge to the skills upgrading of professional life science researchers in bioinformatics. Results of a professional bioinformatgics training program conducted by BioLateral will be presented.