title: ISCB Ebola Award for Important Future Research on the Computational Biology of Ebola Virus.
abstract: Speed is of the essence in combating Ebola; thus, computational approaches should form a significant component of Ebola research. As for the development of any modern drug, computational biology is uniquely positioned to contribute through comparative analysis of the genome sequences of Ebola strains as well as 3-D protein modeling. Other computational approaches to Ebola may include large-scale docking studies of Ebola proteins with human proteins and with small-molecule libraries, computational modeling of the spread of the virus, computational mining of the Ebola literature, and creation of a curated Ebola database. Taken together, such computational efforts could significantly accelerate traditional scientific approaches. In recognition of the need for important and immediate solutions from the field of computational biology against Ebola, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) announces a prize for an important computational advance in fighting the Ebola virus. ISCB will confer the ISCB Fight against Ebola Award, along with a prize of US$2,000, at its July 2016 annual meeting (ISCB Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2016, Orlando, Florida).
authors.affiliation: International Society for Computational Biology, La Jolla, CA, USA ; SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Peter D
authors.initials: PD
authors.lastname: Karp
authors.affiliation: International Society for Computational Biology, La Jolla, CA, USA ; Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Bonnie
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Berger
authors.affiliation: International Society for Computational Biology, La Jolla, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Diane
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kovats
authors.affiliation: International Society for Computational Biology, La Jolla, CA, USA ; Computational Biology and Applied Algorithmics, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbruecken, Germany.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lengauer
authors.affiliation: International Society for Computational Biology, La Jolla, CA, USA ; Hebrew University & Institute of Advanced Studies, Jerusalem, Israel.
authors.forename: Michal
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Linial
authors.affiliation: Center for Systems Biology, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA ; Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease, Harvard School of Public Health, Cambridge, MA, USA ; Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Pardis
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sabeti
authors.affiliation: Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Winston
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Hide
authors.affiliation: International Society for Computational Biology, La Jolla, CA, USA ; Department of Informatics, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology, TUM, Munich, Germany ; Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Burkhard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Rost