Bioinformatics in Africa: The Rise of Ghana?

Abstract

Until recently, bioinformatics, an important discipline in the biological sciences, was largely limited to countries with advanced scientific resources. Nonetheless, several developing countries have lately been making progress in bioinformatics training and applications. In Africa, leading countries in the discipline include South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya. However, one country that is less known when it comes to bioinformatics is Ghana. Here, I provide a first description of the development of bioinformatics activities in Ghana and how these activities contribute to the overall development of the discipline in Africa. Over the past decade, scientists in Ghana have been involved in publications incorporating bioinformatics analyses, aimed at addressing research questions in biomedical science and agriculture. Scarce research funding and inadequate training opportunities are some of the challenges that need to be addressed for Ghanaian scientists to continue developing their expertise in bioinformatics.

Fig 1. Bioinformatics-related publications authored by scientists affiliated with Ghanaian institutions.

As a measure of bioinformatics research output in Ghana, the search terms “next-generation sequencing Ghana,” “computational biology Ghana,” “bioinformatics Ghana,” “genomic Ghana,” and “in silico Ghana” were used to obtain peer-reviewed research articles published between 2004 and 2014 and indexed in the PubMed, Web of Science, and SCOPUS databases (refer to the main text for article inclusion criteria).

Fig 2. Opportunities for developing bioinformatics in Ghana.