ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference on Bioinformatics

The ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference on Bioinformatics is a biennial academic conference on the subjects of bioinformatics and computational biology, organized by the African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ASBCB) in conjunction with the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), of which the ASBCB is an African affilliate.

ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference on Bioinformatics
Discipline	Bioinformatics Computational Biology
Publication details
Publisher	International Society for Computational Biology African Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
History	2007-present
Website	www.iscb.org/africa2025/home

Origin

The conference was first held in 2007 as the "ASBCB Conference on the Bioinformatics of African Pathogens, Hosts and Vectors"^[1].

List of conferences

Year	Location	Venue	Notes
2007	Nairobi, Kenya[1]	International Livestock Research Institute
2009	Bamako, Mali[2]	Azalai Hotel Salam	First conference with ISCB
2011	Cape Town, South Africa[3]	Cape Town International Convention Centre
2013	Casablanca, Morocco[4]	Novotel Casablanca City Center Hotel
2015	Dar es Salaam, Tanzania[5]	White Sands Resort & Conference Centre
2017	Entebbe, Uganda[6]	Uganda Virus Research Institute
2019	Kumasi, Ghana[7]	Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology[8]
2021	Virtual Event[9][10]	Not applicable	Due to impact of Covid-19 pandemic
2025	Cape Town, South Africa[11]	Lagoon Beach Hotel, Conference Centre & Spa

Current identity

Since 2009, the conference has been jointly organized with the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and held in different locations within Africa.^[12] Although having an evident African focus, the meeting is intended to be a truly international event, encompassing scientists and students from leading institutions in the US, Latin America, Europe and Africa. Holding this event in Africa, ISCB and ASBCB intend to promote local efforts for cooperation and dissemination of leading research techniques to combat major African diseases.

Conference Goals

• To impact on existing capacity on developing public health interventions in African countries by supporting collaboration and establishing networks for development and training.
• To expose and educate both junior and established scientists to the latest bioinformatics tools and techniques so that they can be used in researching treatments and cures for African hosts, vectors and disease.

Format of the Meeting

The meeting usually consists of a 3-day conference followed by practical workshops.

Established speakers

Senior speakers with affiliations in different African countries and from elsewhere in the world give presentations to inform their colleagues and people entering the field of recent developments^{[citation needed]}. This is also useful in attracting media attention not just for the conferences themselves but for the implications of bioinformatics in the wider world^[13][14].

Student engagement

The ISCB and ASBCB have a Student Council which organises a Symposium within the main conference^[15]. This is an opportunity for students to present reports on their ongoing projects and to hear advice from other conference attendees.

Workshops and tutorials

Because bioinformatics depends so much on skills in using tools to analyse biological data (see bioinformatics databases and bioinformatics software tools for examples) the workshops and tutorials that are held in conjunction with ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference on Bioinformatics may be the most important outcome of each one.

Immediately prior to the 2011 conference in Cape Town, participants gathered at the University of the Western Cape for a workshop on the bioinformatics tool eBioKit^[16]. Immediately following the 2021 meeting the ASBCB collaborated with the National Institutes of Health Office of Data Science Strategy^[17] in delivering an online Omics Codeathon^[18].

Scientific publications

Since 2009, the ISCB Africa ASBCB Conference has been partnering with the Infection, Genetics and Evolution journal to publish papers presented at the conference.