Table 3:

Basic and expert bioinformatics skill levels

Basic skill level	Basic ‘data types’—sequences and structures of DNA, RNA and protein and their representations in bioinformatics web databases.
	Retrieving information from bioinformatics web databases.
	Pairwise and multiple sequence alignments.
	Higher level organization of and relationships between the basic data types—biochemical pathways, biochemical functions, gene and protein families, protein folds, motifs and regulation.
Expert skill level	Algorithms used for biological data search and analysis.
	Relationship of protein sequence, structure and function.
	Protein structure modeling and its limitations.
	Sequence alignment and motif-matching algorithms, how to interpret their output scores and also their limitations.
	Probability and statistics—extreme value distributions, hidden Markov models, Bayesian networks, profiles, Fundamentals of molecular evolution.
	Fundamentals of machine learning methods used in bioinformatics. Neural networks, support vector machines, random forests, decision trees. Strengths and weaknesses of these methods.
	Metrics for comparing the performance of classification methods—receiver operating characteristic curves, specificity versus sensitivity.
	Skill using a molecular visualization package, such as Chimera [89], PyMol [90] or RasMol [91].

Webservers tested in this study implicitly assume that users have familiarity with the concepts listed under the appropriate skill level.