Widening participation would be key in enhancing bioinformatics and genomics research in Africa

Karikari, Thomas K.; Quansah, Emmanuel; Mohamed, Wael M.Y.

Second, training programmes could be organised for rural health workers to help them apply BGS approaches to improve the diagnosis, characterisation and treatment of common diseases such as infectious, non-communicable and neglected tropical diseases (Karikari and Aleksic, 2015) . The reduced cost of genome sequencing technologies provides an opportunity for more health institutions in Africa to get involved in genomics research (Karikari, 2015a) . Healthcare in rural Africa is poor, and the integration of genomics and bioinformatics technologies can help to improve disease diagnosis and treatment outcomes (Drislane et al., 2014; Karikari and Aleksic, 2015) . Previous attempts at integrating indigenous and orthodox healthcare systems in Africa have proved highly successful (Ngueng-Feze et al., 2011) . Since scientists and healthcare professionals working in rural areas are close to these disadvantaged populations, empowering them to employ BGS tools and techniques for disease-related research would be beneficial in identifying how environmental factors possibly affect health outcomes at the community level. For example, this would help to improve the effectiveness of public health surveillance and the identification of disease risk factors, advancing disease diagnosis and treatment in a timely manner. Moreover, BGS provide the opportunity to further study the usefulness of traditional and herbal medical products in Africa for healthcare purposes, for instance, by screening bioactive compounds for their potential disease-modifying benefits and identifying their molecular mechanisms of action (Karikari and Aleksic, 2015; Karikari and Quansah, 2015) .