Candidates for the 2026 ISB Executive Committee

The ISB EC election runs form September 21- Oct 2. To receive a ballot you need to be an active ISB member as of Sept 16th, 2026. All ISB members should receive a ballot in their email using the address associated with their ISB membership.

There are 5 open positions on the EC this year.

Candiates

  • Charles Tapley (Charlie) Hoyt
  • Christopher Southan
  • Frederique Lisacek
  • Henry Njoku
  • Luana Licata
  • Lyndon Zass
  • Marc E Gillespie
  • Dr. Nivedita Yadav
  • Simona Panni
  • Ziwei Pan

Candidate Biosketches and Statements

Charles Tapley (Charlie) Hoyt

RWTH Aachen University, Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, Aachen, DE

I am a mid-career academic researcher with interest in biocuration, bioinformatics, software development, and open science. I have developed and maintain several curated resources (e.g., Bioregistry), data standards (e.g., SSSOM), software packages (e.g., curies); contribute frequently to external curated resources (e.g., several ontologies); participate in international community projects (e.g., OBO Foundry); and send unsolicited pull requests with drive-by curations to your (open) curated resource. I write about these on my blog (https://cthoyt.com) and host the ISB’s podcast “Curate This!” (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYM0tkKvhlX54EMQGIbAOOhMKlDDPF21P).

I have served on the ISB Executive Committee since Winter 2023 after being elected in the same year when I co-chairing the ISB’s 16th Annual International Biocuration Conference in Padua, Italy and won the ISB’s Early Career Award. In my three year term, I have acted as the EC’s Deputy Chair (under Sue Bello), chaired the Training and Outreach Committee, and maintained the ISB website. My goals continue to be to expand the ISB beyond the typical centers in North America, Britain, and Switzerland – both throughout international, in Europe, and in Germany (my country of residence) by strengthening ties with the German National Data Infrastructure (NFDI) project.

Christopher Southan

University of Edinburgh

Details @ .linkedin.com/in/cdsouthan and ORCID 0000-0001-9580-0446. Curating drug target sequences 1995 to 2007 at SmithKline Beecham, Gemini Genomics, Oxford Glycosciences and AstraZeneca, 2008/9 collating database information for the ELIXIR project @ EBI, full time curator 2012-18 for Guide to Pharmacology, University of Edinburgh (PMID: 41160876, 2026) and since 2016 SAB member for BindingDB advising on the curation of SAR data from patents PMID: 39574417, 2024)

Intersections outlined in Biosketch give me decades of biocuration experience to bring to the EC. Note also two reviews “Opening up connectivity between documents, structures and bioactivity” PMID: 32280387 and “Challenges of Connecting Chemistry to Pharmacology: Perspectives from Curating the IUPHAR/BPS Guide to PHARMACOLOGY” PMID: 30087946. Would like to see ISB develop the application of AI tools to assist biocuration and automated analysis of results. I could also encourage and facilitate more attention to the value of patent data curation.

Frederique Lisacek

Proteome Informatics Group,SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva, CH

PhD in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) from the University Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris, France in 1984. From 1985 to 1998, held research positions in biology labs in France, Japan and Australia working on knowledge representation and predictive methods based on sequence analysis. Successively worked in two biotech companies leading projects on knowledge management and mining in Proteome Systems Ltd in Sydney, Australia (1999-2000) and in Geneva Bioinformatics (GeneBio) S.A, Switzerland (2001-2005). Joined the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in the Proteome Informatics Group in 2006. Manages the group since 2008 driving knowledge discovery projects in proteomics and glycomics. Specialised in glycoinformatics since 2010.

My input to biocuration has been steady over the past two decades but not in the forefront; it encompasses contributions to text mining methods, ontology definition and database development. Since 2010, I have specialised in glycoscience a source of many bioinformatics challenges, somehow a niche research topic though slowly but surely expanding. Our issues span data standardisation, formalisation, and curation. Our community struggles to produce reliable computational solutions for we need to handle the sparsity and the heterogeneity of glycodata.
I have been part of the EC for the past three years and mainly contributed with my experience and energy in reflecting and acting on positioning biocuration 1) in the AI era and 2) in new parts of the world. We have together with the team shaped some initiatives such as co-organising for the first time the Annual meeting on the African continent, thereby including so far non-reached communities. I would like to pursue these activities for another mandate and broaden our current ideas with those of newcomers.

Henry Njoku

Bioinformatics software engineering, University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Henry Njoku is a bioinformatician and digital health professional with experience in biological data management, research infrastructure, and capacity development across sub-Saharan Africa. As a PhD candidate in Bioinformatics at the University of Ibadan (UI) and a Research Assistant/Bioinformatics Systems Administrator with the UI Bioinformatics Group and H3ABioNet UI node, he supports the stewardship, accessibility, and effective use of biological and genomic data through the administration of bioinformatics platforms, computational workflows, and user-support systems. His work contributes to the generation, organization, annotation, and dissemination of high-quality biological data, while promoting reproducibility and FAIR data principles within the African research community. He has also played a key role in training graduate students in bioinformatics tools and data management practices, strengthening local capacity for data-driven life science research. Beyond genomics, he drives initiatives that integrate health, climate, and environmental datasets to support infectious disease surveillance and forecasting, advancing the curation and reuse of multidisciplinary data resources for public health impact. His combined expertise in bioinformatics, data stewardship, open science, research support, and governance positions him to contribute meaningfully to the ISB’s mission of enhancing the quality, accessibility, and long-term value of biological knowledge.

My motivation to serve on the ISB Executive Committee is based on the belief that biocuration is fundamental to the process of turning biological data into information that is reliable, accessible, and reusable to advance research and public health. I am an IT Project Manager with over 10 years of leading a highly motivated team of IT tools development. I am also involved with the Systems Administration of the UI Bioinformatics Group and H3ABioNet UI node where I support graduate students with bioinformatics infrastructure, data management workflows, computational pipelines and user training. In addition to technical contributions, I have more than a decade of experience leading digital health and data-driven projects, including the construction of interoperable health information systems and collaborative platforms that enable data exchange and reuse. I also drive governance by being on the CSIDNet Governance Committee, helping with transparent decision-making and community involvement. I would like to see more support in ISB for building biocuration capacity in underserved regions, more integration of health, genomic and environmental data resources, more opportunities for mentoring early-career curators and engagement with open science initiatives. I am dedicated to contributing to ISB to increase its global influence, and to make the biocuration community more diverse, inclusive and sustainable.

Luana Licata

Department of Biology, University of Rome Tor Vergata

I work as Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the Tor Vergata University of Rome, Italy and I am the scientific coordinator of MINT, the Molecular INTeraction database (ELIXIR Core Data Resources).
My scientific research focuses on the analysis of biological networks, with the aim of understanding the molecular mechanisms involved in complex diseases such as neurodevelopmental disorders and cancer.
I have been working for over 20 years both as a curator and a team coordinator of MINT and SIGNOR, a database that collects experimental verified causal relationships between biological entities. I have collaborated with other research groups in the development, organization and/or curation of several Bioinformatics Resources such as, virusMINT, Complex Portal, DISNOR, CancerGeneNet.

I am a member of the Italy ELIXIR Training Team which has the aim to produce quality training in bioinformatics in order to achieve excellence in life science research. I am also a trainer in Bioinformatics courses on Network Biology, Bioinformatics tools to study protein-protein interactions and Use of Standards, Controlled Vocabularies and Ontologies.
I have experience in organizing biocuration meetings and I am currently a member of the ISB Executive Committee, and I am excited to continue serving the biocuration community in this capacity. Over the past terms, I have contributed as part of the Training, Outreach, and Communication group, coordinated the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Committee, and served as editor of the ISB newsletter. These roles have given me a broad view of the challenges and opportunities facing our community, from ensuring early-career curators have access to training and mentorship, to making sure ISB’s communications reflect the diversity and global reach of its membership. If re-elected, I would like to see continued investment in training pipelines for new curators, stronger outreach to underrepresented regions, and expanded opportunities for cross-database collaboration.

Lyndon Zass

University of Cape Town

I am a Project Manager and data specialist in the Computational Biology Division at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, with a background in Molecular Biology and Human Genetics. My work sits at the intersection of genomics, bioinformatics, public health, and data science, with a particular focus on improving the accessibility, standardisation, biocuration, harmonisation, and reuse of African biomedical and genomic data. I currently serve as the Project Manager of the African Genomics Data Hub (AfriGen-D), an initiative focused on curating African genomic data and metadata, and making it more findable, accessible, and useful for research and precision medicine. I also previously co-led the eLwazi Open Data Science Platform’s Data Support Working Group, where I supported the application of data models, ontologies, and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles to African health and biomedical datasets. My research and professional interests include the biocuration of African genomics data, phenotype harmonisation, biomedical data standards, African genomic representation, and strengthening data infrastructure, resources and capacity for biomedical research across the continent.

I am motivated to serve on the ISB Executive Committee because my work at the University of Cape Town increasingly intersects with biocuration, data stewardship, genomics, bioinformatics, and the development of sustainable research data infrastructures. Through initiatives such as the African Genomics Data Hub (AfriGen-D), I work with metadata standards, data models, ontologies, data harmonisation, and data-quality practices that are fundamental to effective biocuration and the responsible reuse of biological, biomedical, and health data. I believe I would bring a valuable African perspective to the ISB, particularly an understanding of the infrastructural, capacity, funding, and data-governance challenges faced by researchers and institutions across the continent. I would like to contribute to making the Society increasingly inclusive and globally representative, while creating greater opportunities for African researchers to participate in and shape the international biocuration community. My engagement with the ISB reached a significant milestone in 2026 when I co-chaired the organisation of the 19th Annual International Biocuration Conference in Cape Town—the first ISB annual conference held on the African continent. This was an immensely valuable and significant experience that deepened my appreciation for the field of biocuration, the ISB and its international community. I would now like to build on this experience by contributing to the ISB’s leadership, growth, and global impact.

Marc E Gillespie

Pharmacuetical Sciences, St. John’s University, Queens, NY USA

I put my interest in ISB into practice 4 years ago when I joined the ISB Executive Committee, where examples of my recent work include amending the ISB Articles of Association, chairing and co-organizing the AI in Curation workshop at Biocuration 2026, a chance to bring the community together around a topic that is already reshaping how we all do this work. Outside the ISB, I serve on ASBMB’s Public Affairs Advisory Committee, a role that keeps me close to the broader conversation about how science policy and biological knowledge infrastructure is changing, a conversation I think the ISB needs to be squarely part of.
I am a Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at St. John’s University in Queens, NY, USA, and serve as Editor-in-Chief and co-PI on the Reactome Project (reactome.org). My work in biocuration began when I joined the Reactome Team in 2003, a fantastic project and a great time to start in biocuration. As with many groups, Reactome curators grew with the biocuration field, inventing methods and practices as we moved along. I continue to work within the community, meeting many of you along the way.

My interest in joining ISB leadership began at the 2014 Biocuration meeting. Along with Francis Ouellette and Robin Haw, I had the chance to co-chair the 2014 Biocuration meeting in Toronto, CA, at a time when the ISB was growing. The diversity of the members and attendees at biocuration meetings is a strength and a challenge for the society. Working across platforms and fields during the pandemic reminded me again that biocuration is a big tent encompassing many different fields. I believe that with AI, the need for biocuration is growing, and that the field needs leadership that can bring the benefits of biocuration to an expanding group of stakeholders, many of whom work in curation roles but don’t know the ISB exists. We need clear, straightforward support for expanding the ranks of the society. I am very interested in expanding and defining the practicalities and benefits of ISB membership. I think we must explore which other societies and fields we should align with. The value of the ISB hinges on the support and resources that it provides new, mid-career, and experienced biocurators.

Dr. Nivedita Yadav

Indian Biological Data Centre, Regional Centre for Biotechnology, Faridabad, India

Dr. Niveditaa Yadav, M Tech and PhD in Bioinformatics and Data Curator at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC), Regional Centre for Biotechnology (RCB), with expertise in computational biology, genomics, biological data analysis, and biocuration. Her professional work focuses on the curation, validation, standardization, and management of biological research data, with particular emphasis on developing high-quality metadata for national biological data repositories, including the Indian Phenom Repository. She contributes to improving data quality, interoperability, accessibility, and adherence to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. Her experience also includes genomic data analysis and supporting the development of robust workflows for biological data submission and archival. Through her work at IBDC, she contributes to building sustainable national data infrastructure and enabling researchers to discover, access, and reuse biological datasets. Her interests lie at the intersection of biocuration, bioinformatics, genomics, data infrastructure, and Open Science, with a focus on strengthening data-driven and reproducible life-science research in India.

I am motivated to serve on the ISB Executive Committee because I see biocuration as a critical foundation for reliable, reproducible, and reusable biological research. As a Data Curator at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC), RCB, I work at the intersection of biocuration, bioinformatics, genomics, and scientific data infrastructure. My experience includes curating and validating biological datasets, developing standardized metadata for national repositories such as the Indian Phenom Repository, and promoting FAIR data practices.
I would bring to the Executive Committee practical experience from a national-scale biological data infrastructure, particularly perspectives from the rapidly developing research ecosystem in India and the Global South. I hope to contribute to strengthening collaboration among curators, researchers, and data scientists, while promoting recognition and professional development of biocurators.
Within ISB, I would particularly like to see further development of training and mentorship opportunities, community-building initiatives, standardized biocuration practices, FAIR/Open Science, and greater engagement with emerging data-rich fields and researchers from underrepresented regions. I would be honoured to contribute to making ISB a more inclusive, connected, and impactful global biocuration community.

Simona Panni

DiBEST Department, University of Calabria

Simona Panni is Associate Professor in Molecular Biology and Senior Researcher at the University of Calabria. She holds a Master Degree in Biological Sciences from University of Rome Sapienza and a Postgraduate Diploma in Applied Biotechnology (PhD equivalent) from University of Tor Vergata. In her early career, she has been studying protein binding domains for over a decade, achieving a strong background in molecular approaches to study protein-protein interactions and she has collaborated with MINT database. In 2015 and 2016 she has joined the IntAct team as visitor to contribute in developing standards and CV terms to annotate ncRNA interactions (discussed and approved in the HUPO-PSI meeting in Ghent, 2016). Since then, she has been collaborating with IntAct database to annotate non coding RNA interactions, focusing on the model organism S. cerevisiae and on human microRNAs. She is actively participating in the IMEx (International Molecular Exchange) Consortium activities and meetings and has joined several ISB meetings both in presence and online. She has been member of the MC for the COST Action “Gene Regulation Ensemble Effort for the Knowledge Commons” and she has joined the Elixir Biocuration Focus Group till 2025. Relevant publications can be found at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=L2swCTwAAAAJ&hl=it

I am running for a position on the Executive Committee because I believe that high-quality, expertly curated biological data are becoming increasingly important for both experimental research and computational biology. During my research activity, in the fields of molecular interactions and biological networks, I have experienced first-hand how differences in annotation standards, data formats and levels of curation can strongly influence downstream analyses and their reproducibility. In particular I would like to contribute to the ISB community by promoting a wider adoption of common standards and controlled vocabularies among resources collecting ncRNA interactions. An important area is also the relationship between biocuration and artificial-intelligence approaches. AI can support data extraction and annotation, but its reliability depends on well-defined rules and continued expert supervision. ISB could play a leading role in defining good practices for AI-assisted biocuration and in providing training for curators and researchers. I would also like to support initiatives that increase interaction between biocurators, database developers and data users, helping researchers better understand the value of professional biocuration and encouraging their active contribution.

Ziwei Pan

Sage Bionetworks

I am a computational biologist at Sage Bionetworks, where my work sits between analysis and curation across several federally funded data coordination programs. I implement modular pipelines, establish standardized QC, and perform analysis across NGS modalities to harmonize data from multiple sources and support downstream research. I work closely with data managers and curators to develop data standards, metadata models and intake templates for our data coordinating centers to ensure data meet FAIR expectations. I also provided user feedback on AI-assisted internal metadata annotation workflows.
Before Sage, I received my PhD in Biomedical Science from the University of Connecticut, where I co-led the first systematic benchmark of analytical tools on public datasets and established the evaluation metrics that guide tool selection for methylation calling.
My recent service includes the Review Committee for the Bioinformatics Open-Source Conference (BOSC) 2026 and the Advisory Committee for the 2026 MC² Center Virtual Symposia. I used to serve as a Vice President of Outreach for a Women in Science and Engineering Group (an employee resource group) before to coordinate with external institutions and speakers to support seminars, partnerships, and engagement activities. I also have experience in outreach, scientific communication, and consulting strategy.

My intersection with biocuration came through my work. I was hired as a computational biologist to analyze data hosted on our platform, and found that much of the job happens upstream of any analysis: building metadata models and intake standards, managing data from collection through curation and provenance, and developing data models to characterize experimental resources. These works turn unstructured biomedical data into structured ontology-aligned records others can find and reuse. However, it is largely invisible, and it took me time to learn it had a name, terminologies and a society. Many colleagues doing it still do not know and closing that gap is why I am running.
I would bring cross-program coordination with internal data operations teams and external contributors and data-lifecycle data curation experience at consortium scale from an organization supporting multiple data coordinating centers and open benchmarking challenges. My bioinformatics and tool evaluation background will help to make biocuration quality measurable. I also have experience in event organization, scientific communication and digital content development.
Within the ISB I want to see shared evaluation standards for AI-assisted curation, member-specific events, and stronger ties to data coordinating centers, clinical consortia, open-source communities (e.g. Nextflow, Bioconductor) and AI communities.

Upcoming ISB Executive Committee Election

The election for new members of the ISB Executive Committee (EC) will run from Sept 21 – Oct 2 this year. To receive a ballot you need to be an active member (dues paid) as of September 14th, 2026.

Due to the ongoing issue with our bank members can not currently renew their membership. To insure that members affected by this issue can still receive a ballot, we have set up a form to state your intent to renew. If your membership is expired or will expire before September 14th please fill out the form and we will include you in the list to get your ballot.

Intent to Renew

2026 Excellence in Biocuration Advanced Career Award Recipient

Congratulations to Steven Marygold this year’s Excellence in Biocuration Advanced Career award recipient!

Steven has been group manager, curator and nomenclature advisor at FlyBase (flybase.org) for 20 years. During this time, he has made sustained, wide-ranging contributions to biocuration within FlyBase and the wider community in areas ranging from genetic, functional and disease model annotation, to bibliography management and ontology development. His work is described in over 40 publications.

Steven conceived the FlyBase Gene Group resource, which provides expert-curated, logically organised and systematically named gene family data for Drosophila melanogaster. This included a multi-year enzyme annotation project to review and validate GO/EC annotations for ~3,800 enzyme-encoding genes (26% of the proteome), detailed in two dedicated publications. That work led to the generation of FlyCyc, which provides a computed model of Drosophila metabolism, and an ongoing project to manually curate fly metabolic pathways as GO causal activity models (GO-CAMs). Steven also catalogued all ~4,000 ncRNA genes of Drosophila and coordinated their submission to RNAcentral, further demonstrating his cover-all approach to reviewing diverse, previously under-annotated gene classes. Steven is a major contributor to the Gene Ontology, identifying and reporting errors in catalytic and metabolic terms/annotations that propagate to dozens of downstream resources, and is actively involved in ontology development as a GO editor. He collaborates with Rhea, BioCyc, Reactome, RNACentral, UniProt, HGNC and the Alliance of Genome Resources, amplifying the reach of his curation well beyond FlyBase. Steven is also coordinating the establishment of a FlyBase subscription model to cover the loss of US federal funding to the UK site.

Steven’s career is a model of how rigorous, sustained expert biocuration impacts across the bioinformatics and research communities, building lasting community-wide infrastructure.

Publications

  • Garapati PV, Zaru R, Attrill H, dos Santos G, Goodman J, Thurmond J, Marygold SJ. (2026) Comprehensive annotation of the enzymes of Drosophila melanogaster. G3 Genes|Genomes|Genetics 16(2):jkaf294 DOI:10.1093/g3journal/jkaf294
  • Marygold SJ. (2025) FlyCyc: a Pathway/Genome Database for the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. https://biocyc.org/organism-summary?object=DMEL
  • Öztürk-Çolak A, Marygold SJ, Antonazzo G, Attrill H, Goutte-Gattat D, Jenkins VK, Matthews BB, Millburn G, dos Santos G, Tabone CJ, FlyBase Consortium. (2024) FlyBase: updates to the Drosophila genes and genomes database. Genetics 227(1):iyad211. DOI:10.1093/genetics/iyad211
  • Marygold SJ, Chan PP, Lowe TM. (2022) Systematic identification of tRNA genes in Drosophila melanogaster. microPublication Biology 000560. DOI:10.17912/micropub.biology.000560
  • Attrill H, Falls K, Goodman JL, Millburn GH, Antonazzo G, Rey AJ, Marygold SJ, FlyBase Consortium. (2016) FlyBase: establishing a Gene Group resource for Drosophila melanogaster. Nucleic Acids Research 44(D1):D786–D792. DOI:10.1093/nar/gkv1046

ORCID: 0000-0003-2759-266X

2026 Excellence in Biocuration Early Career Award Recipient

Congratulations to Pascal Carme this year’s Excellence in Biocuration Early Career award recipient!

Pascal Carme has been a curator at PomBase for only just over 2 years, but he has quickly established himself as a critical member of the PomBase team. Since joining, he has taken on a substantial share of the community curation review workload, and is now the primary developer of the fission yeast phenotype ontology (FYPO). He is a major contributor to our GO-CAM modelling projects, having created or contributed to more than 50 pathway models. He has also supervised undergraduate students at UCL on GO-CAM modelling projects. He is responsible for the technical review of PomBase micropublications. He also manages the hosting of sequence-based datasets in JBrowse. Pascal has developed a series of outreach seminars, “Just One Thing”, presented through the Pombe Talks seminar series. These sessions highlight specific PomBase features and help users make more effective use of the resource, covering topics such as ontologies, GO-CAMs, and search functionality. He was the lead author of the recent PomBase resource update in Genetics journal.

Publications:

  • PomBase in 2026: expanding knowledge, modelling connections. PMID: 41518600

ORCID: 0009-0003-9059-1333

Nominees for Excellence in Biocuration Early and Advanced Career Awards

The nominees for this year’s are in! Congratulations to all the nominees.

Voting will be open from June 1 – June 12. Only active members are eligible to vote. If you have not renewed your membership, please do so before June 1st. Active members should receive an email with their individual ballot link. The email will be sent to the address associated with your ISB account. If you become a member during the voting period, please reach out to us to receive a ballot.

The nominees for the Excellence in Biocuration Early Career Award are:

  • Pascal Carme, University of Cambridge
  • Kathiyayini Jayaraman, Kriyadocs, Olympia Cyberspace, Guindy, Chennai, India
  • Nancy Ontiveros-Palacios, EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK

Detailed descriptions here

The nominees for the Excellence in Biocuration Advanced Career Award are:

  • Shailesh Kumar, BRIC-National Institute of Plant Genome Research, India
  • Antonina Andreeva, EMBL-EBI, UK
  • Steven Marygold, University of Cambridge, UK
  • Bastian Fromm, The Arctic University of Norway, Norway
  • Sabrina Toro, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
  • Parul Gupta, Oregon State University, USA
  • Scott V Nguyen, American Type Culture Collection, USA

Detailed descriptions here

Biocuration Awards Nominations Open April 20th

Time to start thinking about nominating your friendly neighborhood biocurator (or yourself) for the ISB Biocuration Career Awards! This year we are awarding the Excellence in Biocuration Early and Advanced Career Awards. The awards come with a monetary prize and a speaking slot at the ISB annual general meeting held virtually in late October.

Nominations will be open April 20th, 2026 and will close on May 15th, 2026

Please see the Biocuration Awards page for details.

Biocuration Awards Nominations Open Soon!

Time to start thinking about nominating your friendly neighborhood biocurator (or yourself) for the ISB Biocuration Career Awards! This year we are awarding the Excellence in Biocuration Early and Advanced Career Awards. The awards come with a monetary prize and a speaking slot at the ISB annual general meeting held virtually in late October.

Nominations will officially open in mid-April and will be open for 1 month.

Please see the Biocuration Awards page for details.

Biocuration Insights: UniProt

Biocurators organize biological literature and data into reusable databases and resources that enable researchers to build on past findings, compare results across studies and species, and focus their time on critical scientific questions and drive new research. In many ways, biocurators are the unsung heroes of scientific progress. Therefore, we’re kicking off a series to highlight these efforts.

Our first highlighted resource in this series is the Universal Protein Resource, better known as UniProt (https://www.uniprot.org).

UniProt is a global, freely accessible protein knowledge resource that underpins research across biology, medicine, and biotechnology by combining expert curation, computational methods, and community input to deliver accurate, current, and usable protein information. These biocuration efforts transform large-scale protein data into reliable biological knowledge by carefully selecting high-quality reference proteomes, rigorously extracting experimental evidence from the literature, and structuring representation using interoperable vocabularies and ontologies. UniProt maintains its strong focus on usability—through intuitive search, navigation, and integrated analysis tools—allow researchers to move seamlessly between curated knowledge and methods such as sequence searches, alignments, peptide analysis, and identifier mapping. By integrating community contributions and machine-learning–assisted workflows under expert oversight, this work highlights biocuration as a collaborative, evolving practice essential for understanding biology at scale.

The first paper we’re highlighting is UniProt: the Universal Protein Knowledgebase in 2025 – it provides a foundational infrastructure update—high relevance to ISB community:

  • Core Biocuration Contribution: systematic overhaul of UniProt pipelines, limiting to high‑quality reference proteomes; combines expert annotation, ORCID‑tracked community submissions, and machine‑learning frameworks (UniRule, ProtNLM) to expand functional data and QC.
  • Key Methods:
    • BUSCO‑driven QC & reference‑proteome selection
    • Expanded UniRule & PANTHER rule sets; LLM‑based ProtNLM function naming
    • New Genomics tab linking proteins to genome coordinates
    • Community curation via ORCID submissions
  • Resources Resused: UniProtKB/Swiss‑Prot, UniProtKB/TrEMBL, UniParc, UniRef, Gene Ontology, ChEBI, Rhea, GO‑CAM, InterPro, ProtVista, Complex Portal
  • Impact/Applications: provides a trusted, FAIR backbone for AI/omics research, drug discovery and database interoperability; recognised as a Global Core Biodata Resource.
  • Strengths: Combines expert & ML curation; robust QC; large‑scale reach.
  • Caveats/Limitations: ML predictions need curator validation; initial drop in TrEMBL size.

The second paper we want to highlight is The UniProt Consortium. Searching and navigating UniProt databases (2023):

  • Core Biocuration Contribution: Peer‑reviewed tutorial standardising discovery of curated UniProt knowledge; boosts accessibility and reproducibility.
  • Key Methods:
    • Basic & advanced search protocols with Boolean logic and field filters
    • Demonstrates integration with analysis tools
    • Emphasises FAIR API endpoints and query syntax
  • Resources Reused: UniProtKB, UniRef, UniParc, Proteomes dataset selector, BLAST, Align, ID‑Mapping, REST & SPARQL APIs
  • Impact/Applications: empowers users to retrieve accurate annotations, enabling reproducible data mining and training
  • Strengths: Clear, screenshot‑rich, modular; open access.
  • Caveat/Limitations: Instructional—no new biological data; UI changes may date examples.

We hope you enjoyed this quick-and-dirty summary of two recent papers. Want ISB to highlight your work? Check out this form.

Amos Bairoch, a biocurator at heart, passes away

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.

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