Abstract
At the request of the PLoS Computational Biology Editor-in-Chief, I agreed to write about computational biology in Brazil (see author information in Box 1). That meant describing: a) the history of the field in our country (short as the history of the field itself is short); b) the current state of the field in Brazil; c) the influence of computational biology–related technologies on the development of the national economy; d) the entrepreneurship that is rising from already-established academic activities; and e) educational activities ongoing or planned which are deemed necessary to establish the required critical mass of well-trained specialists. Why is an article like this important now? It is estimated that Brazil combined with China, Russia, and India will have a larger gross national product (GNP) than the US, Japan, Germany, and the UK combined by 2020. In short, we can expect Brazil to have significant impact on the field of computational biology in the years to come, and now is the time to explore that promise. Box 1. Author Biography Goran Neshich, Ph.D., is the Structural Computational Biology (SCB) group leader at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA), National Agricultural Information Technology Research Center (CNPTIA), Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and associate professor at UNICAMP's Department of Biology. After obtaining his Ph.D. in molecular biophysics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Don DeVault's laboratory) in 1989, Neshich conducted his postdoctoral research with Barry Honig at Columbia University. Neshich is the principal author of the STING suite of programs (with the current version being BlueStarSTING), and STING_DB. STING is a popular database and visualization tool providing the largest collection of physicochemical parameters that describe protein structure, stability, function, and interaction with other macromolecules. Neshich chaired a session at the meeting held in November 2004, where the Brazilian Association for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (AB3C) was inaugurated. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) from 2003 to 2005 and chair of the Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2006 conference in Fortaleza, Brazil.
Highlights
At the request of the PLoS Computational Biology Editor-inChief, I agreed to write about computational biology in Brazil
Three other universities closely follow: UNICAMP in Campinas, in the state of Sao Paulo, UFRJ in Rio de Janeiro, and UFMG in Belo Horizonte. These four universities together with EMBRAPA (Brazilian enterprise for research in agriculture, a close equivalent to the US Department of Agriculture), Fiocruz, and Ludwig Institute, both of which are involved in human health related research, and the National Laboratory for Scientific Computation (LNCC), are responsible for most of the scientific publications in computational biology
The X-meeting was a prelude to the second annual meeting of AB3C, which was held together with the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2006 conference in the city of Fortaleza in the state of Ceara, in Northeast Brazil
Summary
At the request of the PLoS Computational Biology Editor-inChief, I agreed to write about computational biology in Brazil (see author information in Box 1). That meant describing: a) the history of the field in our country (short as the history of the field itself is short); b) the current state of the field in Brazil; c) the influence of computational biology–related technologies on the development of the national economy; d) the entrepreneurship that is rising from already-established academic activities; and e) educational activities ongoing or planned which are deemed necessary to establish the required critical mass of well-trained specialists. It is estimated that Brazil combined with China, Russia, and India will have a larger gross national product (GNP) than the US, Japan, Germany, and the UK combined by 2020. We can expect Brazil to have significant impact on the field of computational biology in the years to come, and now is the time to explore that promise
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