It is with great sadness that we learned the passing of Prof. Amos Bairoch on November 29th, 2025. Amos was a deeply valued and admired colleague, as well as a cherished friend to many within the biocuration community. His remarkable blend of enthusiasm, intellect, energy, creativity, humor, and rigor fueled the numerous initiatives he led. His unwavering work ethic consistently resulted in work of exceptional quality.
Amos can be considered the original professional biocurator, even though he came about it in an accidental way – as all great breakthroughs. During his Ph.D. at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, he was taken off the bench path due to a faulty mass spectrometer in the early 1980s. While waiting for the machine to be repaired, he started to work on a software package (PC/Gene) to analyze protein sequences. The software relied on the Protein Identification Resource (PIR) of the National Biomedical Research Foundation (NBRF), that had been developed by Margaret Dayhoff starting in 1965. This set the scene for Swiss-Prot to emerge in 1986 as Amos had broadened Dayhoff’s protein curation to produce a structured on-line resource. Protein annotation needed to abide by rules and Amos set out to state those rules, share them with other biocurators thereby initiating standards.
Many years before the development of biomedical ontologies, Amos spearheaded the development of controlled vocabularies and was aware of the need to channel those efforts within the life science community. He co-founded the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) in 1998 with Ron Appel, who had launched Expasy, one of the first web servers for molecular biology, at the time tailor-made to hosting Swiss-Prot.
Amos’ major input to biocuration was praised all throughout. He was recognized with an Exceptional contribution to ISB award in 2021. Ten years earlier, his contribution to the expansion of proteomics was crowned by the HUPO Distinguished Achievement Award in Proteomic Sciences (2011). As recently as 2025, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) acknowledged his commitment with a Senior Scientist Accomplishment award. Importantly for the biocuration community, the seed of ISB was planted in many minds and, with his impulse, it was established in Switzerland in 2009.
Amos was a relentless biocurator and probably one of the most productive in the array of curated databases. Whoever has seen him sitting in meetings will always remember his eyes and fingers stuck on a laptop and whether he was gathering information on proteins for Swiss-Prot (1986-2009), neXtprot (2009-2022), or cell lines for Cellosaurus (2014-2025), it remained an obsessive task for him. Yet, as soon as he raised his head from his laptop, he would be keen to discuss and share on the latest cool information he found or on any topic anyone would bring about.
We say goodbye to a great scientist, colleague, and friend, but his legacy will continue to inspire.
