African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

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African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology - Wikipedia

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ASBCB
African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Formation	2004
Founded at	Cape Town, South Africa
Type	Non-profit organisation
Purpose	Professional association for bioinformatics and computational biology in Africa
Region served	Africa
Services	Professional membership Networking Research projects Conferences
Fields	Bioinformatics Computational Biology
Affiliations	International Society for Computational Biology
Website	https://www.asbcb.org/

The African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ASBCB)^[1] is a non-profit professional association dedicated to the advancement of bioinformatics and computational biology in Africa.

Origins

ASBCB was established in February 2004 at a meeting in Cape Town, South Africa^[2].

Objectives

Identify, promote and establish opportunities for networking.
Encourage and develop bioinformatics and computational biology nodes.
Increase awareness and promote the use of bioinformatics and computational biology.
Facilitate access to bioinformatics and computational biology infrastructure.
Promote bioinformatics and computational biology education.^{[citation needed]}

Activities

The Society serves as an international forum and resource devoted to developing competence and expertise in bioinformatics and computational biology in Africa. It complements its activities with those of other international and national societies, associations and institutions, public and private, that have similar aims, including in Nigeria^[3] and South Africa^[4]. It also promotes the standing of African bioinformatics and computational biology in the global arena through liaison and cooperation with other international bodies^[5].

Affiliation

It is an affiliated regional group of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) ^[6].

Conferences

Since 2007 it has been hosting the ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference on Bioinformatics^[7] at different locations in Africa to bring together scientists working in bioinformatics from different African nations together with other international researchers in the field.

References

^ https://www.asbcb.org/
^ "About – ASBCB".
^ Fatumo, SA (2014). "Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in Nigeria". PLOS Comput Biol. 10 (4): e1003516. Bibcode:2014PLSCB..10E3516F. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003516. PMC 3998874. PMID 24763310.
^ Mulder, NJ (2016). "The Development of Computational Biology in South Africa: Successes Achieved and Lessons Learnt". PLOS Comput Biol. 12 (2): e1004395. Bibcode:2016PLSCB..12E4395M. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004395. PMC 4742231. PMID 26845152.
^ "Alan Christoffels: Building bioinformatics in Africa". Nature Africa Briefing. Nature. 10 March 2025. Retrieved 15 August 2025.
^ ISCB Affiliates. "Africa". International Society for Computational Biology. Retrieved 15 August 2025.
^ de Villiers, Etienne; Kumuthini, Judit; Bongcam-Rudloff, Erik (October 2011). "ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference on Bioinformatics and eBioKit Workshop". EMBnet.journal. 17 (2): 7–9. doi:10.14806/ej.17.2.248. Retrieved 16 August 2025.

v t e Bioinformatics
Databases	Sequence databases: GenBank, European Nucleotide Archive, DNA Data Bank of Japan and China National GeneBank Secondary databases: UniProt, database of protein sequences grouping together Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL and Protein Information Resource Other databases: BioNumbers, Protein Data Bank, Ensembl, InterPro, KEGG, and Gene Ontology Specialised genomic databases: BOLD, Saccharomyces Genome Database, FlyBase, VectorBase, WormBase, Rat Genome Database, PHI-base, Arabidopsis Information Resource, GISAID and Zebrafish Information Network
Software	BLAST Bowtie Clustal EMBOSS HMMER MUSCLE PANGOLIN SAMtools SOAP suite TopHat
Other	Server: ExPASy Rosalind (education platform)
Institutions	Broad Institute Computational Biology Department (CBD) Microsoft Research - University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology (COSBI) Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS) DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Flatiron Institute J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Japanese Institute of Genetics Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC) Philippine Genome Center (PGC) Scripps Research Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) Wellcome Sanger Institute Whitehead Institute
Organizations	African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ASBCB) Australia Bioinformatics Resource (EMBL-AR) European Molecular Biology network (EMBnet) International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) International Society for Biocuration (ISB) International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Student Council (ISCB-SC) Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) Japanese Society for Bioinformatics (JSBi)
Meetings	Basel Computational Biology Conference‎ ([BC²]) European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) International Conference on Bioinformatics (InCoB) International Conference on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (CIBB) ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference on Bioinformatics Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB)
File formats	CRAM format FASTA format FASTQ format NeXML format Nexus format Pileup format SAM format Stockholm format VCF format GFF format GTF format
Related topics	Computational biology List of biobanks List of biological databases Molecular phylogenetics Sequencing Sequence database Sequence alignment
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