Update: New IT centre for Advanced Courses in Uruguay

A permanent training room housing a suite of high-powered computers, essential for analysing human and pathogen genomes, marks the beginning of a centre for Advanced Courses in Uruguay.

As part of a Wellcome Trust-funded three-year programme of bioinformatics workshops in Latin America, the Trust has been working with the Institute of Hygiene at the School of Medicine, Uruguay, to set up the 'Carlos Hormaeche Bioinformatics IT Suite'.

Opened on 16 June 2006, the centre runs workshops primarily focused on the human and pathogen genomes - sequenced, in part, at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, near Cambridge, UK - and the tools that have been developed to analyse them.

The IT suite has been named after Professor Carlos Hormaeche, a world authority on Salmonella, who died last year. Formerly a senior researcher at the Institute of Hygiene in Montevideo, Professor Hormaeche was Head of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Emeritus Professor of Microbiology at the University of Cambridge, consultant to the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and active ambassador of Uruguayan and European science.

The courses at the centre form just part of the Wellcome Trust Advanced Course programme. Advanced Courses are usually held at the Sanger Institute. By offering the courses to countries in the developing world, with all of the tuition fees sponsored by the Trust, the Trust aims to build on the local institutions' strong scientific knowledge and front-line clinical research. This will provide their researchers with up-to-date training in the fast-moving arena of analysis and provide the mechanisms to keep up with new developments. In addition, these courses strengthen relations between the Wellcome Trust, Sanger Institute and the groups within South America, stimulating discussion, exchange and long-distance collaboration.

Following the workshops in Uruguay, the Wellcome Trust plans further workshops and laboratory-based courses in other developing countries, where it has Major Overseas Programmes studying malaria and other important diseases of the tropics. These include Kenya, Thailand, Malawi and Vietnam.

See also

• Update: Wellcome Trust Advanced Courses programme celebrates 50th training course (News, 12 April 2006)
• Advanced Courses
• Major Overseas Programmes
• Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

External links

• Professor Carlos Hormaeche