Amos Bairoch

Who is Amos Bairoch?

Amos Bairoch is a Swiss bioinformatician, born 22 November 1957.

As of 2013, he is professor of Bioinformatics at the Department of Human Protein Sciences of the University of Geneva and group leader at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. His current group is called CALIPHO to combine bioinformatics, curation, and experimental efforts to functionally characterize human proteins.

His main work is in the field of protein sequence analysis and more particularly in the development of databases and software tools for this purpose. His most important contribution is the input of human knowledge by careful manual annotation in protein-related data. His first project, as a Ph.D. student was the development of PC/Gene, an MS-DOS based software package for the analysis of protein and nucleotide sequences. PC/Gene was commercialized, first by a Swiss company then by Intelligenetics in the US which was later bought by Oxford Molecular.

While working on PC/Gene he started to develop an annotated protein sequence database which became Swiss-Prot and was first released in July 1986. From 1988 onward it has been a collaborative project with the Data Library group of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory which later evolved into the European Bioinformatics Institute.