Qunfeng Dong
Despite the rapid advances in bioinformatics in recent decades, the development of computational software suitable for practical use still lags significantly behind the growing demand from biologists. Often this is due not to the technical challenges of software development, but rather to a serious shortage of developers available to write the software. Although the number of bioinformatics graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and full-time staff has been increasing, this has not been enough to control the software shortage due to the complicated realities of these jobs. For instance, in the interest of career development, these individuals may feel the need to work on theoretically-minded research or large-scale projects rather than developing applied or smaller-scale utilities to solve some of the problems that biologists face day-to-day. As a result, development of practical bioinformatics software remains inadequate, and biologists are left frustrated that they lack the necessary computational tools to complete their work. This situation must be improved in order to meet the demand for practical bioinformatics software.