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Big data management in biological domains

Guest Editors

Anna Bernasconi, PhD, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Umberto Ferraro Petrillo, PhD, Università di Roma – La Sapienza, Italy
Simona E. Rombo, PhD, University of Palermo, Italy 


BMC Bioinformatics called for submissions to our Collection on Big data management in biological domains.

This Collection welcomed submissions on methodologies, pipelines, and tools for handling big heterogeneous data corpora, for creating integrative databases, or resolving complex biological problems. This includes, but is not limited to, approaches of data and knowledge management or integration workflows; conceptual models and ontologies; databases or information systems design, implementation, and evaluation; domain-specific modelling languages; data FAIRness assessments; and big data analytics architectures.

Meet the Guest Editors

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Anna Bernasconi, PhD, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Anna Bernasconi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano. Her research focuses on bioinformatics, data and knowledge management, and data science. She applies conceptual modeling, data integration, and semantic web technologies, with solid experience in biological and genomic data and life sciences applications. Anna has co-authored more than 30 international journal papers, won three prizes for her doctoral thesis, and achieved tenure. She is active in the conceptual modeling, database, and bioinformatics communities, with several paper presentations and the organization of tutorials and workshops.

Umberto Ferraro Petrillo, PhD, Università di Roma – La Sapienza, Italy

Umberto Ferraro Petrillo is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the Department of Statistical Sciences, Università di Roma, La Sapienza. His research interests include bioinformatics, big data management, and computing, with a focus on the development of efficient methods for distributed genomic data processing. He serves as the Scientific Director of the TeraStat supercomputing facility. He is also a member of the editorial boards for BMC Bioinformatics and the Journal of Supercomputing.

Simona E. Rombo, PhD, University of Palermo, Italy

Simona E. Rombo is a full professor of Computer Science, working since 2006 on algorithms and techniques for the analysis of large amounts of (heterogeneous) data in the biological domain; data integration; bioinformatics; networks analysis; machine learning; data compression. She is CEO and co-founder of an innovative startup, providing software services for the automatic support in the context of Precision Medicine. She has led both national and international research projects. She is Associate Editor of Journal of Big Data and member of the Editorial Board of BMC Bioinformatics and Journal of Computational Biology. She has co-authored above 70 scientific publications and an Italian patent.

About the Collection

BMC Bioinformatics is calling for submissions to our Collection on Big data management in biological domains.

As biological information is increasing at an unprecedented rate, it directly impacts the design and future development of information and data management pipelines; thus, new ways of processing data, information, and knowledge in bioinformatics environments are strongly needed. This Collection welcomes submissions on methodologies, pipelines, and tools for handling big heterogeneous data corpora, for creating integrative databases, or resolving complex biological problems. This includes, but is not limited to, approaches of data and knowledge management or integration workflows; conceptual models and ontologies; databases or information systems design, implementation, and evaluation; domain-specific modelling languages; data FAIRness assessments; and big data analytics architectures.
 

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  1. Named entity recognition is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Recognizing entities in biomedical text, known as the BioNER, is particularly crucial for cutting-edge applications. However, BioN...

    Authors: Yu Wang, Hanghang Tong, Ziye Zhu, Fengzhen Hou and Yun Li
    Citation: BMC Bioinformatics 2025 26:63
    Content type: Research Published on:

  4. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has transformed biological research by offering new insights into cellular heterogeneity, developmental processes, and disease mechanisms. As scRNA-seq technology advance...

    Authors: Xiaoxu Cui, Renkai Wu, Yinghao Liu, Peizhan Chen, Qing Chang, Pengchen Liang and Changyu He
    Citation: BMC Bioinformatics 2025 26:33
    Content type: Research Published on:

  5. The explosive growth of next-generation sequencing data has resulted in ultra-large-scale datasets and significant computational challenges. As the cost of next-generation sequencing (NGS) has decreased, the a...

    Authors: Gunhwan Ko, Pan-Gyu Kim, Byung-Ha Yoon, JaeHee Kim, Wangho Song, IkSu Byeon, JongCheol Yoon, Byungwook Lee and Young-Kuk Kim
    Citation: BMC Bioinformatics 2024 25:353
    Content type: Software Published on:

  8. Base editing is an enhanced gene editing approach that enables the precise transformation of single nucleotides and has the potential to cure rare diseases. The design process of base editors is labour-intensi...

    Authors: Lucas Schneider and Peter Minary
    Citation: BMC Bioinformatics 2024 25:330
    Content type: Research Published on:

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of original Research, Software and Database articles. Should you wish to submit a different article type, please read our submission guidelines to confirm that type is accepted by the journal. Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. During the submission process you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select ''Big data management in biological domains'' from the dropdown menu.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.