A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(July 2018) |
Amos Bairoch | |
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Born | [1] | 22 November 1957
Alma mater | University of Geneva [2] |
Known for | |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
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Institutions | Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics |
Website | web |
Amos Bairoch (born 22 November 1957) [1] is a Swiss bioinformatician [2] [6] [7] and Professor of Bioinformatics at the Department of Human Protein Sciences of the University of Geneva where he leads the CALIPHO group [8] at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) combining bioinformatics, curation, and experimental efforts to functionally characterize human proteins. [9]
His father was the economic historian Paul Bairoch.
His first project as a Ph.D. student was the development of PC/Gene, [10] an MS-DOS–based software package for the analysis of protein and nucleotide sequences. PC/Gene was commercialized, first by a Swiss company (Genofit) then by Intelligenetics in the US which was later bought by Oxford Molecular.[ citation needed ]
His main work [5] is in the field of protein sequence analysis and more particularly in the development of databases and software tools for this purpose. His most important contribution is the input of human knowledge by careful manual annotation in protein-related data. [11]
While working on PC/Gene he started to develop an annotated protein sequence database which became Swiss-Prot and was first released in July 1986. [12] From 1988 onward it has been a collaborative project with the Data Library group of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory which later evolved into the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI).
The Swiss-Prot database is the primary protein sequence resource in the world and has been a key research instrument for both bioinformaticians and laboratory-based scientists in a very wide range of applications. [13] A measure of its success is the recent development of UniProt, the world's most comprehensive catalogue of information on proteins. [14] UniProt is a central information resource of protein sequences and functions created by joining the information contained in Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL, and the American Protein Information Resource (PIR) databases.
In 1988, he started to develop PROSITE, [15] a database of protein families and domains. A little while later he created ENZYME, [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] a nomenclature database on enzymes as well as SeqAnalRef, [21] a sequence analysis bibliographic reference database. [22] [23]
In collaboration with Ron Appel he initiated, in August 1993, the first molecular biology WWW server, ExPASy. [24] What was intended as a prototype grew rapidly into a major site that provides access to the many databases produced partially or completely in Geneva as well as many tools for the analysis of proteins (proteomics).
In 1998, with colleagues in Geneva and Lausanne, he was one of the founders of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, whose mission is to establish in Switzerland a center of excellence in the field of bioinformatics with an emphasis on research, education, services and the developments of databases and tools. [25]
In November 1997, together with Ron Appel and Denis Hochstrasser, he founded GeneBio (Geneva Bioinformatics SA), a company involved in biological knowledge. In April 2000, the above persons with Keith Rose and Robin Offord founded GeneProt (Geneva Proteomics), a high throughput proteomics company that ceased operations in 2005. [26]
Since 2009, in the framework of the CALIPHO group, directed by himself and Lydie Lane, he is involved in the development of neXtProt [27] [28] [29] a resource which aims to provide life scientists with a broad spectrum of knowledge on all human proteins.
He is also involved in the development of the Cellosaurus a knowledge resource on cell lines.
According to Google Scholar [5] and Scopus, [6] As of 2015 [update] his most highly cited peer reviewed papers in scientific journals have been published in Nucleic Acids Research , [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] the Biochemical Journal , [35] [36] Nature , [37] Briefings in Bioinformatics , [38] and Database . [39]
Bairoch was the recipient of the 1993 Friedrich Miescher Award from the Swiss Society of Biochemistry, the 1995 Helmut Horten Foundation Incentive Award, the 2004 Pehr Edman award, the 2004 European Latsis Prize, the 2010 Otto Naegeli prize, the 2011 HUPO Distinguished Achievement Award in Proteomic Sciences., [40] the 2013 EUPA proteomics pioneer award, [1] and in 2018 the ABRF Award.
As the process keeps going down we're reaching the point where every genome that can be sequenced will be sequenced. [41]
Post-translational modification (PTM) is the covalent and generally enzymatic modification of proteins following protein biosynthesis. This process often occurs in the endoplasmic reticulum and the golgi apparatus. Proteins are synthesized by ribosomes translating mRNA into polypeptide chains, which may then undergo PTM to form the mature protein product. PTMs are important components in cell signaling, as for example when prohormones are converted to hormones.
UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived from the research literature. It is maintained by the UniProt consortium, which consists of several European bioinformatics organisations and a foundation from Washington, DC, United States.
The Protein Information Resource (PIR), located at Georgetown University Medical Center, is an integrated public bioinformatics resource to support genomic and proteomic research, and scientific studies. It contains protein sequences databases
The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is an intergovernmental organization (IGO) which, as part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) family, focuses on research and services in bioinformatics. It is located on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge, and employs over 600 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff. Institute leaders such as Rolf Apweiler, Alex Bateman, Ewan Birney, and Guy Cochrane, an adviser on the National Genomics Data Center Scientific Advisory Board, serve as part of the international research network of the BIG Data Center at the Beijing Institute of Genomics.
InterPro is a database of protein families, protein domains and functional sites in which identifiable features found in known proteins can be applied to new protein sequences in order to functionally characterise them.
PROSITE is a protein database. It consists of entries describing the protein families, domains and functional sites as well as amino acid patterns and profiles in them. These are manually curated by a team of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and tightly integrated into Swiss-Prot protein annotation. PROSITE was created in 1988 by Amos Bairoch, who directed the group for more than 20 years. Since July 2018, the director of PROSITE and Swiss-Prot is Alan Bridge.
Expasy is an online bioinformatics resource operated by the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. It is an extensible and integrative portal which provides access to over 160 databases and software tools and supports a range of life science and clinical research areas, from genomics, proteomics and structural biology, to evolution and phylogeny, systems biology and medical chemistry. The individual resources are hosted in a decentralized way by different groups of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and partner institutions.
SUPERFAMILY is a database and search platform of structural and functional annotation for all proteins and genomes. It classifies amino acid sequences into known structural domains, especially into SCOP superfamilies. Domains are functional, structural, and evolutionary units that form proteins. Domains of common Ancestry are grouped into superfamilies. The domains and domain superfamilies are defined and described in SCOP. Superfamilies are groups of proteins which have structural evidence to support a common evolutionary ancestor but may not have detectable sequence homology.
Protein function prediction methods are techniques that bioinformatics researchers use to assign biological or biochemical roles to proteins. These proteins are usually ones that are poorly studied or predicted based on genomic sequence data. These predictions are often driven by data-intensive computational procedures. Information may come from nucleic acid sequence homology, gene expression profiles, protein domain structures, text mining of publications, phylogenetic profiles, phenotypic profiles, and protein-protein interaction. Protein function is a broad term: the roles of proteins range from catalysis of biochemical reactions to transport to signal transduction, and a single protein may play a role in multiple processes or cellular pathways.
neXtProt is an on-line knowledge platform on human proteins. It strives to be a comprehensive resource that provides a variety of types of information on human proteins, such as their function, subcellular location, expression, interactions and role in diseases. The major part of the information in neXtProt is obtained from the UniProt Swiss-Prot database but it is complemented by data originating from high-throughput studies with an emphasis on proteomics. neXtProt offers also an advanced search capacity based on the SPARQL technology as well as an API that allows to programatically extract the data stored in the resource. It is developed by the CALIPHO group directed by Amos Bairoch and Lydie Lane of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB).
OMPdb is a dedicated database that contains beta barrel (β-barrel) outer membrane proteins from Gram-negative bacteria. Such proteins are responsible for a broad range of important functions, like passive nutrient uptake, active transport of large molecules, protein secretion, as well as adhesion to host cells, through which bacteria expose their virulence activity.
Rolf Apweiler is a director of European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) with Ewan Birney.
SWISS-MODEL is a structural bioinformatics web-server dedicated to homology modeling of 3D protein structures. Homology modeling is currently the most accurate method to generate reliable three-dimensional protein structure models and is routinely used in many practical applications. Homology modelling methods make use of experimental protein structures ("templates") to build models for evolutionary related proteins ("targets").
Teresa K. Attwood is a Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Computer Science and School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester and a visiting fellow at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). She held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at University College London (UCL) from 1993 to 1999 and at the University of Manchester from 1999 to 2002.
In bioinformatics, the PANTHER classification system is a large curated biological database of gene/protein families and their functionally related subfamilies that can be used to classify and identify the function of gene products. PANTHER is part of the Gene Ontology Reference Genome Project designed to classify proteins and their genes for high-throughput analysis.
Julian John Thurstan Gough is a Group Leader in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) of the Medical Research Council (MRC). He was previously a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Bristol.
Christine Anne Orengo is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London (UCL) known for her work on protein structure, particularly the CATH database. Orengo serves as president of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), the first woman to do so in the history of the society.
In molecular biology, MvirDB is a publicly available database that stores information on toxins, virulence factors and antibiotic resistance genes. Sources that this database uses for DNA and protein information include: Tox-Prot, SCORPION, the PRINTS Virulence Factors, VFDB, TVFac, Islander, ARGO and VIDA. The database provides a BLAST tool that allows the user to query their sequence against all DNA and protein sequences in MvirDB. Information on virulence factors can be obtained from the usage of the provided browser tool. Once the browser tool is used, the results are returned as a readable table that is organized by ascending E-Values, each of which are hyperlinked to their related page. MvirDB is implemented in an Oracle 10g relational database.