Amos Bairoch (born 22 November 1957) is a Swiss bioinformatician and

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...

of Bioinformatics at the Department of Human Protein Sciences of the

University of Geneva The University of Geneva (French: ''Université de Genève'') is a public research university located in Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded in 1559 by John Calvin as a theological seminary. It remained focused on theology until the 17th centur ...

where he leads the CALIPHO group at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) combining bioinformatics, curation, and experimental efforts to functionally characterize human proteins. His father was the economic historian

Paul Bairoch Paul Bairoch (24 July 1930 in Antwerp – 12 February 1999 in Geneva) was a (in 1985 naturalised) Swiss economic historian of Belgian descent who specialized in urban history and historical demography. He published or co-authored more than two d ...

Education

His first project as a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

student was the development of PC/Gene, an

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

–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.

Research

His main work 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. While working on PC/Gene he started to develop an annotated protein sequence database which became

Swiss-Prot 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 ...

and was first released in July 1986. From 1988 onward it has been a collaborative project with the Data Library group of the

European Molecular Biology Laboratory The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to molecular biology research and is supported by 27 member states, two prospect states, and one associate member state. EMBL was created in 1974 and ...

which later evolved into the

European Bioinformatics Institute 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 Wel ...

(EBI). The

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. A measure of its success is the recent development of UniProt, the world's most comprehensive catalogue of information on proteins. UniProt is a central information resource of protein sequences and functions created by joining the information contained in

TrEMBL 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 ...

, and the American Protein Information Resource (PIR) databases. In 1988, he started to develop

PROSITE 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 Bioinformatic ...

, a database of protein families and domains. A little while later he created ENZYME, a nomenclature database on enzymes as well as SeqAnalRef, a sequence analysis bibliographic reference database. In collaboration with Ron Appel he initiated, in August 1993, the first molecular biology WWW server, ExPASy. 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. 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. Since 2009, in the framework of the CALIPHO group, directed by himself and Lydie Lane, he is involved in the development of

neXtProt 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 ...

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 Cellosaurus is an online knowledge base on cell lines, which attempts to document all cell lines used in biomedical research. It is provided by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB). It is an ELIXIR Core Data Resource as well as an IR ...

a knowledge resource on cell lines. According to

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and

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...

, his most highly cited

peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer revie ...

ed papers in

scientific journals In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. Content Articles in scientific journals are mostly written by active scientists such as s ...

have been published in ''

Nucleic Acids Research ''Nucleic Acids Research'' is an open-access peer-reviewed scientific journal published since 1974 by the Oxford University Press. The journal covers research on nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA, and related work. According to the ''Journal Ci ...

'', the ''

Biochemical Journal The ''Biochemical Journal'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal which covers all aspects of biochemistry, as well as cell and molecular biology. It is published by Portland Press and was established in 1906. History The journal was established ...

'', ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...

'', ''

Briefings in Bioinformatics ''Briefings in Bioinformatics'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering bioinformatics, including reviews of databases and analytical tools for genetics and molecular biology. It also publishes primary research papers on novel bioinforma ...

'', and ''

Database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

''.

Awards and honours

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 European Latsis Prize is awarded annually by the European Science Foundation for "outstanding and innovative contributions in a selected field of European research". The prize is worth 100,000 Swiss francs and is awarded within a different dis ...

, the 2010

Otto Naegeli Prof. Dr. Otto Naegeli (born 9 July 1871 in Ermatingen; died 11 March 1938), was a Swiss hematologist. He was the brother of Oskar Naegeli. He is best known for refining the classification of leukemia by dividing them into myelogenous and lymphocy ...

prize, the 2011

HUPO The Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) is an international consortium of national proteomics research associations, government researchers, academic institutions, and industry partners. The organization was launched in February 2001, and it promote ...

Distinguished Achievement Award in Proteomic Sciences., the 2013 EUPA proteomics pioneer award, and in 2018 the ABRF Award.

Quotes

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bairoch, Amos 1957 births Living people Swiss bioinformaticians Fellows of the International Society for Computational Biology