Last year, BILSAB hosted the International Symposium on Bioinformatics (InSyB2021) from December 15 to 17, 2021 with the theme of “Bioinformatics: Going Back to the Fundamentals". It was the first time InSyB was hosted in Turkey and was held as a virtual event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The symposium brought together students, academics, and industry professionals, working on different aspects of biomedical sciences and healthcare, for a cross-pollination of ideas and towards building a collaborative ecosystem and lasting networks.
InSyB is a flagship annual event of the Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNET), one of the oldest (23 years) and notable bioinformatics organisations in the Asia-Pacific region. InSyB focuses on thematic discussions targeting younger researchers in a local community. The InSyB symposium started in 2017, inaugurated in Indonesia with Universitas YARSI as the host and in 2021 it was the 5th instalment of InSyB. The symposium was founded to encourage, support and extend computational biology for translational research, primarily aimed at infusing bioinformatics into life science research and providing a forum for networking.
InSyB 2021 provided a platform for the participants to exchange ideas with luminaries from the field. Admission to the symposium was made free to remove any barrier to participation. Consequently, more than 1,100 people registered for the symposium, with 84 abstract submissions for oral and poster presentations. Submissions were received from diverse geographical regions, covering 15 countries, namely Algeria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, Nigeria, Turkey, UAE, and the United States of America. Over the two-and-half-day duration of the event, the symposium was actively attended by close to 600 individuals across all the platforms (Zoom and YouTube), and showcased eight (8) keynote talks, 58 accepted oral/poster presentations, and a community track with a panel discussion on “Current Topics in Computational Biology". The event was graced with an opening keynote by Prof. Dr Hasan MANDAL, the President of The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK). The event was also supported by the International Society for Computational Biology - Regional Students Group (ISCB-RSG) Turkey, which led the community track.
We thank all the participants, the members of the organizing and scientific committees, TUBITAK, ISCB-RSG-Turkey, Bezmialem Vakif University, and APBioNET for all the support and contributions towards the success of InSyB 2021. Notably, InSyB is growing out of its shadows, with numerous historic milestones achieved in 2021. The event has set the bar high with the highest ever number of registrations from a diversity of geographies, actual participants, abstracts submitted, oral presentations, and poster presentations in the 5-year history of InSyB!
Here is wishing continued success to future InSyBs.
