The Brazilian Bioinformatics League promotes the first competition in the area of bioinformatics in Latin America. Held in partnership with the Regional Student Group of Brazil (ISCB Regional Student Group Brazil) and the Brazilian Association of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (AB3C), the competition aims to promote the growth of the area in Brazil and is structured in three phases, all online . The first phase begins on August 4th (Sunday).
According to Marcelo Mendes Brandão, researcher at the Center for Molecular Biology and Genetic Engineering (CBMEG) at Unicamp and vice-president of AB3C, the competition promises to engage and stimulate the formation of interdisciplinary teams and attract new talent to the area. For him, bioinformatics is a great accelerator of knowledge, as it is possible to analyze large volumes of data and generate results of interest. “With data available in databases public and free of charge, great discoveries can be made”, comments Marcelo Brandão.
Bioinformatics, as the name suggests, is the combination of two areas of knowledge, biology and information technology, also known as computational biology. The idea of organizing the League is to discover future leaders of bioinformatics in the country. “We want to expand this area of knowledge within the country, in universities, and also generate curiosity. Making students think about problems mathematically and generating results with biological meaning”, comments Brandão.
The researcher believes that Brazil is particularly interesting for biologists and bioinformaticians. “If we think about the State of São Paulo, for example, we have people gathered here who came from all over the world and we have an impressive diversity of fauna and flora in the Atlantic Forest and the Cerrado. All this data is being collected and the bottleneck is in the ability to analyze this data. The need now is to connect clinical and biological data with the voluminous genomic data and this is the role of bioinformatics,” he reports.
Phases - In the first phase of the Brazilian League, in August, teams will have 60 multiple choice questions to level the competitors. The second phase takes place in September and features five challenges in computational biology, which will require participants to use a programming language and search for ideas in specialized literature.
The three teams that achieve the highest scores will be called up for the final phase, which consists of a scientific project to be prepared using fictitious data. Both the development and the results will be presented in the form of short seminars. The winners will be announced at the X-meeting taking place in Campos do Jordão, SP, in October 2019 and prizes will be awarded in cash worth up to R$1.000.
Initiative - The doctoral student in Genetics and Molecular Biology at the Lucas Miguel de Carvalho Institute of Biology, one of the creators and president of the League, reports that he found a partnership with ISCB RSG-Brazil and with AB3C to organize the competition. According to him, in Brazil the bioinformatics only appears in undergraduate and postgraduate courses as a subarea, with rare exceptions. “Talking to the president of AB3C, I discovered that it would be very complicated to hold an Olympics and we therefore decided to hold an event for higher education”, he explains. This is how Lucas Miguel started looking for regional partners. “Some people immediately volunteered to help and join the organization team with the aim of taking bioinformatics to all corners of the country”, he comments.
The president of the League explains that he has always enjoyed participating in the Olympics. He participated in Mathematics competitions and teaches classes for participants in Computing Olympiads. He believes that in the Olympics students experience a new way of thinking, different from formal school. “My dream is to hold a Bioinformatics Olympiad for high school students. I would like them to be able to envision different areas as a profession, different from medicine, law, engineering”, he says.
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