A roadmap for Tunisian bioinformatics after the first national conference: Perspectives and strategic priorities

The first Tunisian Bioinformatics Conference, held in Sousse in 2025, brought together several hundred researchers, students and startup founders over four days, covering artificial intelligence, deep learning, genomics, metagenomics, microbiomics, metabolomics, statistics, mathematical modelling and legal perspectives on bioinformatics, and reaching more than 100,000 online views. Writing as a member of the scientific committee and chair of several plenary sessions, we combine a meeting report with a structured roadmap for the field in Tunisia. A contemporary working definition of the bioinformatician is offered, distinguishing the discipline from the incidental use of computational tools by biologists or of biological data by computer scientists. Five areas for action are then developed: fostering a collaborative and strategic mindset oriented toward national priorities; recognising, empowering and retaining bioinformatics talent, including the formalisation of academic pathways from Bachelor's to professorship; building foundational infrastructure through pooled national sequencing and computing platforms, shared standard operating procedures and open code-sharing; strengthening decentralised training capacity in southern and interior regions; and establishing ethical governance, data-access frameworks and Nagoya Protocol compliance. The paper argues that the decisive next step for Tunisian bioinformatics is the transition from applied, service-oriented analysis to fundamental, method-driven research.