Computational Biology in Brazil

At the request of the PLoS Computational Biology Editor-inChief, I agreed to write about computational biology in Brazil (see author information in Box 1). That meant describing: a) the history of the field in our country (short as the history of the field itself is short); b) the current state of the field in Brazil; c) the influence of computational biology–related technologies on the development of the national economy; d) the entrepreneurship that is rising from already-established academic activities; and e) educational activities ongoing or planned which are deemed necessary to establish the required critical mass of well-trained specialists. Why is an article like this important now? It is estimated that Brazil combined with China, Russia, and India will have a larger gross national product (GNP) than the US, Japan, Germany, and the UK combined by 2020. In short, we can expect Brazil to have significant impact on the field of computational biology in the years to come, and now is the time to explore that promise.