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It’s hard to believe that when F1000Prime launched in 2002, the field of Bioinformatics was still considered by many to be in its infancy, even though computers had been routinely used to analyze data in molecular biology from as early as the 1960s. Nevertheless, recognizing the field’s significance we launched our service with a Bioinformatics Section as one of five inaugural Sections in the Genomics & Genetics Faculty.

Since then, the field of Bioinformatics has come a long way and has rapidly evolved from one that simply applies computational techniques to increase our understanding of biological processes to one that now involves both the creation and development of databases, algorithms, computational processes and statistical techniques for the management and analysis of biological data. It is, therefore, fitting that we now recognize how far this field has come by significantly increasing our coverage with today’s launch of our Bioinformatics, Biomedical Informatics & Computational Biology Faculty.

As the name of our new Faculty suggests, we are also recognizing the prominence of two other closely related disciplines that are often synonymous with Bioinformatics – namely Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology – which will ensure we are also able to highlight important advances to meet the challenges that translational medicine and other fields such as ecology and ethology face.

I am, therefore, delighted to announce the appointment of David Lipman, Janet Thornton and Alfonso Valenciaas our Heads of Faculty for the Bioinformatics, Biomedical Informatics & Computational Biology Faculty.

 

Dr. David Lipman is the Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). He is one of the original authors of the BLAST algorithm, which is used for the sequence analysis of proteins and nucleotides, and one of the originators of the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project, which makes available the genomes of thousands of influenza virus isolates. He currently leads an intramural research program at NCBI comprising groups led by Stephen Altschul, David Landsman, Eugene Koonin and Aravind L. Iyer, and also contributes to the maintenance and development of the GenBank sequence database.

Professor Dame Janet Thornton is Director Emeritus of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), having served as Director from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a crucial role in the development of ELIXIR – the pan-European infrastructure for biological data. Her research interests investigate protein structure, function and evolution using computational methods.

“With the flood of publications and the growth of computational biology, bioinformatics and modeling as central activity in the life sciences, it is timely to create a new Faculty for this branch of the field. F1000Prime aims to provide a systematic means to filter for the outstanding studies published in our field. I hope that the launch of our eminent new Faculty will facilitate navigation through the relevant literature and make us more efficient and effective as scientists.”
Professor Alfonso Valencia is the Director of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute and the Structural and Computational Biology Group leader at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO); he is also President of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). His research interests focus on understanding how cancer progresses through the development of computational methods to analyze, represent and interpret the genomes of cancer-related proteins.

“In my opinion, F1000Prime provides an essential tool for all researchers to help them find key papers that they might otherwise have missed. The launch of our Bioinformatics, Biomedical Informatics & Computational Biology Faculty is a welcome addition to the areas F1000Prime already covers.”

 

Our Heads of Faculty have worked tirelessly to assemble an outstanding lineup of Sections and Section Heads so that today we launch with eight new Sections, each headed by some of the most eminent figures in the field:

 

Big Data & Analytics

• Mark Gerstein Yale, USA
• Wolfgang Huber EMBL Heidelberg, Germany

 

Cataloguing & Benchmarking Computational Methods

• Pierre Baldi UCI, USA
• Torsten Schwede University of Basel, Switzerland

 

Computational Genomics & Genetic Analysis

• Ewan Birney EMBL-EBI, UK
• Jill Mesirov UCSD, USA
• Martin Vingron Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Germany

 

Sequence Analysis

• Desmond Higgins University College Dublin, Ireland
• Gary Stormo Washington University in St Louis, USA

 

Structural Bioinformatics, Modeling & Simulation

• Michael Sternberg Imperial College London, UK
• Anna Tramontano Sapienza University, Italy

 

Systems & Network Biology

• Gary Bader University of Toronto, Canada
• Nicolas Le Novère Babraham Institute, UK
• Uwe Sauer ETH Zurich, Switzerland

 

Text Mining & Ontologies

• Lynette Hirschman MITRE, USA
• Suzanna Lewis Berkeley, USA
• Robert Stevens University of Manchester, UK

 

Translational Bioinformatics

• Søren Brunak University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• John Overington Stratified Medical, UK
• Philippe Sanseau GlaxoSmithKline, UK

 

But this lineup is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, since our Section Heads have also been hard at work assembling a stellar lineup of Faculty Members and Associate Faculty Members to join them in their respective Sections to evaluate the literature. I would, therefore, like to welcome all of our newest Members to the F1000 Family, and look forward to reading their insightful opinions on the most significant advances in their field.

So take a look at our newest Faculty – Bioinformatics, Biomedical Informatics & Computational Biology – and remember to sign-up for email alerts for one or more of its Sections to ensure that you never miss a recommended article relevant to your interests.