BioAfrica - Report I 2006 by: T. de Oliveira & S. Cassol

BioAfrica has matured as an important web-based resource for information on HIV and Bioinformatics.

BioAfrica Report I 2006 by: Tulio de Oliveira and Sharon Cassol, the BioAfrica developers.

The BioAfrica website was first established in 2001, as part of an African-based research program funded by the Wellcome Trust. The website is designed to take advantage of the unprecedented amounts of genetic and biomolecular data, and to assist researchers in the retrieval, collation and interpretation of large amounts of sequence and protein data accumulated as a result of an intensified global effort to contain and eradicate HIV/AIDS.

In the last five years, BioAfrica has received over two millions visits, with 3/4 of a million in 2005 alone. As recently reported in Science, 23 December 2005, p.1877, "Researchers will find tools for analyzing HIV molecular data and information on the main African strain at BioAfrica, created by virologists at Oxford University and the University of Pretoria in South Africa. BioAfrica complements other HIV sites, such as the sequence bank at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, by spotlighting HIV's subtype C, the viral variant that predominates in the southern part of the continent. Users can download free software for determining a virus's subtype or visit a new proteomics section that probes the sequences and structures of HIV's 19 proteins."

BioAfrica, with its special focus on southern Africa, contains information and maps on the distribution and changing dynamics of subtype C in Africa, and provides open access(and downloading) of bioinformatics tools including, an automated subtyping tool and a Genetic Data Environment (GDE) software program for the analysis of HIV-related microbial pathogens. The website also hosts the first HIV proteomics and structural genomics resource, and provides information on local and international capacity-building workshops related to bioinformatics, data mining, genetic evolution and laboratory-based analyses.

The website is a free resource designed to serve the scientific community. We encourage researchers to make use of information and programs available and to contribute to this growing resource. The website is accessed at http://www.bioafrica.net

Below are a list of academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, sequence databases and bioinformatics software repositories that provide a link to BioAfrica.