Reference Module in Life Sciences

Shoba Ranganathan is an Honorary Professor of Bioinformatics in Applied Biosciences, Macquarie University. She was the first Chair of Bioinformatics in Australia (2004-22). She has held research and academic positions in India, USA, Singapore and Australia as well as a consultancy in industry. Shoba's research addresses several key areas of bioinformatics to understand biological systems using computational approaches. Her group has achieved both experience and expertise in different aspects of computational biology, ranging from metabolites and small molecules to biochemical networks, pathway analysis and computational systems biology. She has authored as well as edited several books and contributed several articles to the 1^st edition of this Encyclopedia. She was awarded the 2023 Outstanding Contributions to the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Award. She is an Honorary Senior Fellow of the Australian Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology since 2018 and an ISCB Fellow since 2023.

Prof Paul Cotter is a Senior Principal Research Officer and Head of Food Biosciences at Teagasc Food Research Centre at Teagasc, Moorepark, Fermoy, Ireland. He is also the CTO/co-founder of SeqBiome, a microbiome sequencing and bioinformatics service provider. Prof Cotter is a molecular microbiologist, with a particular focus on the microbiology of foods (especially fermented foods), the food chain and of humans, as well as probiotics, postbiotics and bacteriocins. This research has been funded through Irish funding agencies, the European Union and a wide range of industry collaborations. Prof Cotter is the author of >400 peer-reviewed in highly impacting journals such as Cell, Nature, Nature Foods, Nature Aging, Nature Medicine, Nature Reviews Microbiology, Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, was included in the Clarivate list of highly cited researchers for 2018-2023, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp in 2024 and is the Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Microbiology.