It is our great pleasure to announce the recipient of the 2021 Exceptional Contribution to Biocuration Award:
Prof. Amos Bairoch, University of Geneva and SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
Amos created the Swiss-Prot knowledgebase in 1986, which rapidly became the gold standard for proteins in terms of biocuration. Nobody, except Michael Ashburner, contributed more to the biocuration field. Amos was definitively the most accurate and productive biocurator in Swiss-Prot. In 2002, he co-founded UniProt, the universal protein resource, and Swiss-Prot became UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, the expertly curated section of UniProtKB. UniProt is the reference resource in the field of proteins: it is accessed by hundreds of thousands of users each month and is cited in tens of thousands of publications. UniProt is an Elixir core data resource. In 2009, Amos left UniProt and co-founded NextProt, a knowledge platform on human proteins, which constitutes the reference knowledgebase for human protein annotation in the context of HUPO Human Proteome Project (HPP). Last but not least, he created Cellosaurus, a knowledge resource on cell lines, which attempts to document all cell lines used in biomedical research. Cellosaurus is now considered as the reference for cell lines in biology and is an Elixir core data resource. Amos is also co-founder of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and of the ExPASy Bioformatics portal. But it is impossible to list all his contributions.
Congratulations to Amos!
Thank you to the Award Committee:
Meghan Balk
Rigden, Dan
Donna Maglott
Susan Tweedie
Jana Sponarova