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Monday, July 21: ISMB/ECCB Day 2 Highlights and Recap
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Day 2 of ISMB/ECCB 2025 started off with a celebration of the ISCB 2025 Class of Fellows where they were presented with the Fellows Awards. Congratulations once again to the 2025 Class of Fellows!
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Following the Fellows presentation and the keynote address from Dr. Amos Bairoch (read more below) we had a full day of COSI tracks and special sessions, including Bioinformatics in the UK.
Read on for the highlights of the second day of the conference!
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Keynote Address: Amos Bairoch
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Dr. Amos Bairoch, our 2025 Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award winner, spoke to our attendees this morning, giving his keynote address, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: From Swiss-Prot to Cellosaurus, 45 years of biocuration.”
The talk offered a richly contextual reflection on the evolution of biocuration. With more than four decades of experience in the field, Bairoch outlined how foundational and forward-looking his work has been across generations of bioinformatics resources.
He traced the early days of biocuration back to 1980, when he manually typed in protein sequences for a software package that would become PC/Gene. By 1986, he had led the first release of Swiss-Prot, an effort that eventually involved more than 200 annotators, now recognized as biocurators. He continued to shape the field with the development of PROSITE and ENZYME in 1988, neXtProt in 2010, and the launch of Cellosaurus in 2012, a resource he continues to lead and expand.
While technical progress has been remarkable, Bairoch emphasized that many of the core challenges in biocuration remain unchanged. From underfunding and undervaluation to persistent misconceptions about the replaceability of expert curation, the field continues to face pressures from evolving technologies and shifting expectations. He offered a brief history of how funders and users have viewed biocuration over the decades, highlighting the ongoing disconnect between its recognized importance and its consistent underfunding.
Through humor, historical perspective, and insights—including hard-earned lessons about licensing, funding structures, and institutional pressures—Bairoch made a compelling case for recognizing the enduring value of human expertise. He closed by celebrating Cellosaurus, a curated knowledge resource encompassing over 166,000 cell lines, underscoring how such efforts remain essential infrastructure for the life sciences.
If you missed the keynote or would like to revisit it, it will be available in the ISMB/ECCB On-Demand Library within 24 hours.
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BOSC
The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC (open-bio.org/events/bosc), is one of the oldest COSIs; this year it celebrates its 26th birthday! Today’s program began with a welcome from chair Nomi Harris, followed by an overview of BOSC’s parent organization, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, by OBF President Peter Cock. The opening session also included a tribute to Peter Amstutz, a co-founder of the Common Workflow Language and very active member of the bioinformatics open-source community who passed away recently. Peter contributed his energy and vision to many BOSCs and CollaborationFests.
The first BOSC keynote talk was delivered by Dr. Christine Orengo: “Working together to develop, promote and protect our data resources: Lessons learnt developing CATH and TED.” Dr. Orengo is the Vice President of the ISCB and was previously the ISCB’s first female President. Dr. Orengo’s talk covered the history of CATH (which is celebrating its 30th anniversary) and the insights CATH and TED provided about protein structure and function, while also providing a model of how to bring the community together to sustain a resource. Interestingly, this also involved working together with competitors to improve each other's approaches.
BOSC’s packed first-day schedule included sessions focusing on topics in open science and open-source bioinformatics, including analytic tools, pipelines, and platforms. Day 1 closed with a session on open data which highlighted the need for AI-readiness and interoperability.
Be sure to join us tomorrow, when we partner with the Bio-Ontologies and Knowledge Representation (BOKR) COSI, and don’t miss our closing panel on Data Sustainability!
EvolCompGen
Presentations in today's EvolCompGen track treated several synergistic themes. The first theme focused on fast reconstruction of tumor cell evolution, including efficient selection of molecular features in various data types and identification structural variants. It was striking that presentations explored the variety of molecular data that can be used for tracking cancer progression.
The second main theme approached similar evolutionary questions on a very different time scale. These included phylogeny- and orthology-related studies, covering issues important for function prediction, and phylogenetic sequence and tree based methods for investigating protein family evolution, with particular attention to scalability in the face of the data deluge. Presentations in the session used a refreshing variety of computational techniques, ranging from machine learning, Bayesian statistics, algorithm theory to combinatorial optimization.
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🎉Youth Bioinformatics Symposium Winner
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Congratulations to Zeyu Peter Yao from AlphaMind Club, Singapore, for winning the 2025 YBS Student challenge with their submission "Explainable Subcellular Localization Predictor"!
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Important Lunch Reminders
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Food Reminder:
To make sure there’s enough for everyone, attendees are reminded to take only one sandwich, one bag of crisps, one piece of fruit, and one drink. With a full house each day, your cooperation helps ensure all participants are fed and cared for. Thank you for respecting these limits.
Allergen Station:
If you're looking for ingredient details, visit the dedicated allergen station in Hall 2 (immediately to the right as you enter). The catering staff are ready to help, and this setup is designed to reduce wait times for all.
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- Talk and poster presenters: Please review the details found on the Presenter Information Page.
- Having trouble accessing the virtual platform?
- Make sure you’re logged in using the correct email address. Remember: You must use the email you used to register for the conference in order to access the virtual platform.
- Refresh your browser! Clear your cache/cookies and try again.
- Try a different browser. Chrome works best.
- If you're still experiencing issues, please reach out to [email protected]
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Coming Up Tomorrow, Tuesday, July 22
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