Rising Strengths Hong Kong SAR in Bioinformatics

Abstract

Hong Kong's bioinformatics sector is attaining new heights in combination with its economic boom and the predominance of the working-age group in its population. Factors such as a knowledge-based and free-market economy have contributed towards a prominent position on the world map of bioinformatics. In this review, we have considered the educational measures, landmark research activities and the achievements of bioinformatics companies and the role of the Hong Kong government in the establishment of bioinformatics as strength. However, several hurdles remain. New government policies will assist computational biologists to overcome these hurdles and further raise the profile of the field. There is a high expectation that bioinformatics in Hong Kong will be a promising area for the next generation.

STS-NLSP: A Network-Based Label Space Partition Method for Predicting the Specificity of Membrane Transporter Substrates Using a Hybrid Feature of Structural and Semantic Similarity

“…However, these approaches are hindered by the scarcity of the high-resolution structures of membrane transporters, which are generally difficult to be resolved by experimental technologies. The second category of approaches are ligand-based methods (Chakraborty et al, 2017), via the structural likeness of ligands to known substrates. The most commonly applied ligand-based approach is the quantitative structure-activity relationship (SAR or QSAR) model, which aims to build a mapping from molecular descriptors of ligands to biological functions (e.g., whether the compound is a specific transporter substrate).…”