This webinar will be the first of our series of webinars on the topic of biocuration and discuss programming skills that can be beneficial in biocuration, as well as provide advice on how to acquire them.

In an ELIXIR survey in 2019 which aimed at identifying training needs in biocuration, the most commonly indicated ones were programming / scripting / coding, development and use of ontologies and database management. In addition skills like programming and extracting data from literature were mentioned as decisive for a successful biocuration career. With our webinar series we want to help to close this gap: Biocurators from different backgrounds and institutes will share their experience on how they have acquired these relevant skills in their job, how they apply these in their works and why they benefit from it. The speakers will also point to helpful tools and resources they use.

In this first webinar we will hear from two UniProt biocurators who will share their experience on how they acquired programming skills and show you some intuitive scripts in Python and SQL which they use to facilitate some of their curation tasks. In addition, we will introduce other helpful curation software, like UniFire, a functional protein annotation system.

Speakers

Elena Speretta, EMBL-EBI

Elena Speretta is a Biocurator in the Protein Function Content team of UniProt at EMBL-EBI working on the curation of Drosophila proteins as well as the creation of rules for automatic annotation of protein function. Prior to joining EMBL-EBI, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Dundee, UK. She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK and undergraduate degree from the University of Trieste, Italy.

Pedro Raposo, EMBL-EBI

Pedro Raposo is a Bioinformatician in the Protein Function Content team of UniProt at EMBL-EBI working on creation of rules for automatic annotation of protein function. After obtaining his MSc in Bioinformatics, he worked at the UK Stem Cell Bank on genomic data, before joining EMBL-EBI.