Because bioinformatics touches so many subareas of biology, and deeply involves researchers from outside of biology, there will be no single department that can naturally house all bioinformatics researchers. Moreover, it is essential that researchers in bioinformatics have serious interaction with biologists who are not specialists in bioinformatics but who use bioinformatics tools to address biological problems. For those reasons, there needs to be a place where the bioinformatics specialists interact among themselves, and are visible and yet are easily accessible to the rest of the campus. There needs to be a central group that organizes seminars, encourages outside visitors, helps to develop curriculum and to supervise graduate students, provides research facilities, and coordinates funding efforts. Clearly, a bioinformatics center is needed. Such a center could be aligned with the proposed genomics center.
A center for bioinformatics could play a service role on campus as well as a research role. It could collect, install and maintain essential software and databases, it can make specialized machines available to people from outside of the center, it could consult and offer advise, and it could offer courses on the use of bioinformatics tools. The need and desire for such services, and dedicated staff, is very great on campus. IT does not adequately provide such services at the level desired by the biological community on campus. It should be understood, however, that the campus would have to finance that service role, either through recharges or through support from central campus funds.
Because cross-discipline interaction, and interaction with non-specialists is so crucial to bioinformatics, hopefully, the center will be located on the main campus, rather than south of U.S. 80.