Presential-like e-learning tool for teaching bioinformatics Sergio Ramírez (1) , Javier Rios (1) , Oliverio Vega (1) and Oswaldo Trelles (1) (1) Computer Architecture Department, University of Malaga, Spain MOTIVATION: E-learning infrastructure is becoming the standard of fact for deploying courses and training material in several domains. Bioinformatics, one of the most dynamic fields of research, is a good example. However, face-to-face interaction between teachers and students is also needed to promote and improve the controlled interchanging of ideas in a geographically distributed environment. There are many tools that can be used for knowledge distribution, like forums (1) or virtual campus (2, 3), but these tools does no offers the same interaction as needed in a real classrooms. The current video-conference tools offer a more interactive way to talk with a group of persons, but are more oriented to environments where a group of people wants to talk and freely interact with the rest of the group. These video-conference tools do not make distinction between users, all of them considered partners with similar privileges. In a classroom the converse situation is present: the professor acts as the leader to keep an order; especially if we talk about a very young students. To make this possible it is necessary to assign different roles to users, giving special privileges to teachers to control the participation of students, control the session and assigning temporary rights to the students so can participate interactively in the lecture. BACKGROUND: Several tools have been implemented to deal with this problem. For example, GroupLog (2) and Moodle (3) are used to distribute remote knowledge in a virtual campus. Theses tools offer a framework to access the educative material, make examinations, etc but they lack on interaction of a real classroom. Netmeeting (4, 5), MSN Messenger (6) or Marratech (7) are well-known and profusely used tools in the field of video-conference communications. In addition to the problem described in the previous paragraph, these tools have strong dependency of external servers where the users must be registered and get login. The access of these servers is restricted, so is not possible to perform administrative tasks to configure the working scenario even more, users can communicate with people that are not in the classroom and who can interfere in the development of the lecture. There are other video conference tools covering the educational environment, (e.g. RELATE: REmote LAnguage Teaching (8)), is an application oriented towards language teaching through the network providing tools for video and audio transmission, blackboard and chat. In the same line, the Pidgin group (9) has developed a new plug-in for their ‘pidgin instant messenger' that manages the conversations as if they were a classroom. This tool: Virtual Classroom Plug-in for Pidgin (10) is still under development, but already offers a chat and a blackboard tools to communicate the users and it will have support for video and audio transmission in the near future. METHODS: Our main goal is to develop an application that combines the features of the e-learning applications with the interaction that the video-conference tools offer. As a novel contribution, the application grants different rights for different roles to be played by teachers and students so they can have different views of the same environment. The application has a modular design based on the integration of plug-ins, so it can be easily extended with new features. To have a fluid communication between the teacher and the students is a basic requirement for obtain good teaching results. We have used a basic server-client architecture, that organizes the users in individual classes, totally independent between them. This schema of connection reduces the interchanging of unnecessary data outside of the classroom and avoids possible interferences between simultaneous classrooms. Inside a classroom the teachers are in charge of distribute the information sent by a student to the rest of them (see FIG. 1). This is possible because the control