Like many institutions we have experienced the pressure of many final year students wishing to do projects coupled with extremely limited financial resources that are not sufficient to support a laboratory based project without additional funding from existing research grants. Finding 'dry' projects that still provide a challenge to the student that goes beyond a literature review or dissertation is not easy but the requirements are that the student can find out something novel follow scientific method and have the scope to achieve the maximum grade if the project goes well. I have recently started to offer projects that make use of the wealth of post-genomic information and free databases that now exist together with sequence information for many organisms to design projects where information from one species can be used to inform a programme of research on another species.
Food Biosciences is small compared to most Biological Sciences departments (about 55 students per year of undergraduate study and the same on MSc programmes) and about 20 staff offer approximately three project titles each. At present I am the only member of staff offering bioinformatics projects although some of my colleagues do offer alternative dry projects in the form of conducting food choice surveys or accessing results from large-scale diet and health studies. We have no restrictions on project choice other than to limit the number of students per staff member to around four. Both 'wet' and 'dry' projects carry the same amount of credit (40 out of 120 credits) in the final year and run over two terms. This is the second year of offering informatics projects in my present job but I also ran them in my previous position when I was a post-doc in a Biological Sciences department. I would say that they were more popular amongst the Biologists than those studying Food Science or Nutrition probably because the former have a better background in genetics and plant science and are more aware of the growth of bioinformatics within their discipline.
