Collection
Thank you, Alfonso: An Impactful Bioinformatics Collection
Last year marked 20 years of Alfonso leading Bioinformatics. We are expressing our gratitude and celebrating his remarkable contributions by highlighting some of the 62,000 papers he handled. Thank you, Alfonso, for your tireless dedication, strong leadership, and remarkable contributions to the journal and the broader scientific community.
Learn more about the journal and how you can contribute to the scientific community here.
Summary: Assessing linkage disequilibrium (LD) across ancestral populations is a powerful approach for investigating population-specific genetic structure as well as functionally mapping regions of disease susceptibility. Here, we present LDlink, a web-based collection of bioinformatic modules that ...
Motivation: There is a strong demand in the genomic community to develop effective algorithms to reliably identify genomic variants. Indel detection using next-gen data is difficult and identification of long structural variations is extremely challenging. Results: We present Pindel, a pattern ...
Motivation: Computational annotation of protein coding genes in genomic DNA is a widely used and essential tool for analyzing newly sequenced genomes. However, current methods suffer from inaccuracy and do poorly with certain types of genes. Including additional sources of evidence of the existence ...
Summary : Visualizing genes’ structure and annotated features helps biologists to investigate their function and evolution intuitively. The Gene Structure Display Server (GSDS) has been widely used by more than 60 000 users since its first publication in 2007. Here, we reported the upgraded GSDS ...
Summary: The two main functions of bioinformatics are the organization and analysis of biological data using computational resources. Geneious Basic has been designed to be an easy-to-use and flexible desktop software application framework for the organization and analysis of biological data, with ...
Motivation Microsatellites are a widely-used marker system in plant genetics and forensics. The development of reliable microsatellite markers from resequencing data is challenging. Results We extended MISA, a computational tool assisting the development of microsatellite markers, and reimplemented ...
Summary: A tool to predict the effect that newly discovered genomic variants have on known transcripts is indispensible in prioritizing and categorizing such variants. In Ensembl, a web-based tool (the SNP Effect Predictor) and API interface can now functionally annotate variants in all Ensembl and ...
Summary: An easy-to-use, versatile and freely available graphic web server, FoldIndex© is described: it predicts if a given protein sequence is intrinsically unfolded implementing the algorithm of Uversky and co-workers, which is based on the average residue hydrophobicity and net charge of the ...
Motivation: The Glimmer gene-finding software has been successfully used for finding genes in bacteria, archæa and viruses representing hundreds of species. We describe several major changes to the Glimmer system, including improved methods for identifying both coding regions and start codons. We ...
Motivation: Robust large-scale sequence analysis is a major challenge in modern genomic science, where biologists are frequently trying to characterize many millions of sequences. Here, we describe a new Java-based architecture for the widely used protein function prediction software package ...
Motivation: Quality assessment of protein structures is an important part of experimental structure validation and plays a crucial role in protein structure prediction, where the predicted models may contain substantial errors. Most current scoring functions are primarily designed to rank ...
Motivation: Detection of random errors and systematic biases is a crucial step of a robust pipeline for processing high-throughput sequencing (HTS) data. Bioinformatics software tools capable of performing this task are available, either for general analysis of HTS data or targeted to a specific ...
Summary: A combination of bisulfite treatment of DNA and high-throughput sequencing (BS-Seq) can capture a snapshot of a cell's epigenomic state by revealing its genome-wide cytosine methylation at single base resolution. Bismark is a flexible tool for the time-efficient analysis of BS-Seq data ...
Motivation Gene lists are routinely produced from various omic studies. Enrichment analysis can link these gene lists with underlying molecular pathways and functional categories such as gene ontology (GO) and other databases. Results To complement existing tools, we developed ShinyGO based on a ...
Summary: CRISPRdirect is a simple and functional web server for selecting rational CRISPR/Cas targets from an input sequence. The CRISPR/Cas system is a promising technique for genome engineering which allows target-specific cleavage of genomic DNA guided by Cas9 nuclease in complex with a guide ...
While it’s difficult to fully capture the scale of Alfonso’s contributions, here are a few impressive statistics:
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62,000 papers handled as Executive Editor (more than 3,000 a year)
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6,500 manuscripts handled as Associate Editor
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30 reviews completed
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More than 35 Associate Editors appointed
We sincerely thank Alfonso for his immense dedication, vision, and support over these two decades. We also encourage you to revisit his first editorial from 2004, which continues to resonate with the journal's direction today:
