Didn't get an Xbox 360?

Given that there's a skills shortage in bioinformatics, how do you convince students to spend their college years studying multiple alignments and talking about semantic life science databases when pretty much every other course on offer either sounds sexier or is more likely to make them rich?

Start young, that's how. Get to them in high school. You can talk all you want about role models but really the best way to do it is to appeal through what high school kids like best, at least in my male white middle class experience: porn and computer games. America's Army knows this already.

There's no bioinformatics porn, yet. There are plenty of bioinformatics computer games, though.

Starting off with the very basics, the Nobel Foundation has a host of different Flash games based on various prizes awarded over the years. For example, there's a simple DNA game based on the 1962 Prize for Medicine that went to Crick, Watson and Wilkins and a game called Cell Division Supervisor based on the 2001 Prize.

The UK's Royal Society - who've been in the science news recently - have a marginally more complex game with a celebrity tie-in. Activistion may have Tony Hawk, but the Royal Society have Terri Atwood of PRINTS fame. It involves drag n' drop sequence alignments. I actually quite like it - it'd keep kids occupied for a couple of minutes, anyway - but I'm perturbed by the fact that the animations depicting sequence database searches and the like take place in an Internet Explorer window that is clearly titled "Welcome to MSN" - does the Society know something that we don't?

Finally, the genuinely impressive Origin: Unknown from the Southwest Biotechnology and Informatics Centre is a complex web based sci-fi game combining space laboratories and holo-supervisors with BLAST and ClustalW. Beats Myst any day.

(I'm joking about the computer games and porn, thing, obviously. But getting kids interested in bioinformatics is an interesting topic: check out Sandra Porter's blog or this article about high school kids being taught bioinformatics, which is via Snowdeal).