**About the Editors**

#### **Agostinho Antunes**

Prof. Agostinho Antunes is the Head of Evolutionary Genomics and Bioinformatics in the CIIMAR, Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research, University of Porto, and he is a Professor at the Department of Biology at the University of Porto, Portugal. His major research interests include genomics and blue biotechnology of natural resources, from microorganisms to animals, and their environmental interactions, disease, and health.

#### **Guillermin Ag ¨uero-Chapin**

He is an auxiliary researcher (PhD) at CIIMAR, Centro Interdisciplinar de Investigac¸ao Marinha ˜ e Ambiental, Universidade do Porto (UP), Portugal. He majored in Pharmaceutical Sciences (1998) at the Universidad Central de Las Villas (UCLV), Cuba, and holds a Master's degree in biochemistry (2009) from the Medical School "Dr. Zerafin de Zarate Ruiz", Cuba. PhD in biology awarded with honors by UP, Portugal (2009). His overall research expertise has been related to genetic engineering applied to plant and microbial biotechnology and, later, in the chemo-bio-informatics field applied to drug discovery. He also worked in algorithm development to address functional and comparative genomics, molecular evolution, and peptide drug search and design. Recently, he has been dedicated to applying complex networks for visualizing and analyzing functional classes of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and for multi-reference similarity-based searches. The research in these areas, along with internal and external collaborators, has allowed him to register 43 publications in the WoS (17 in the last 5 years), 5 book chapters, and 1 book with recognized publishers. In the last 5 years, he has participated in 4 projects funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) of Portugal, acting as co-PI and PI in two of them. He has been a member of academic boards in Portugal (Master, 2021), Spain, and Italy (PhD, 2022–2023), as well as a member of the Research Topic and Reviewer Boards in Marine Drugs and Antibiotics Journals (2020–2022). He is also a reviewer of prestigious journals and an evaluator of national projects in Ecuador and Chile. His current research interest is in the field of discovery and design of peptide drugs from AMPs, assisted by classical and emerging computational tools from marine sources.

#### **Yovani Marrero-Ponce**

He is a full professor and principal researcher at the University of San Francisco de Quito, leading the "Grupo de Medicina Molecular y Traslacional (MeM&T)". He holds a degree in pharmaceutical sciences and a Master's degree in biochemistry, followed by a PhD in chemistry from Havana University, Cuba. He has expertise in chemo-bio-med-informatics, medicinal chemistry, pharmacogenomics, computational biology, mathematical chemistry, and peptide drug design. He has developed 11 multiplatform software products and published over 170 papers in ISI journals (more than 120 as first, last, or corresponding author, h-index = 47). He has directed numerous graduate and undergraduate theses, participated in 14 R&D projects, and won several prestigious awards, such as the Cuban Academy of Sciences Award, the TWAS Award, and the Royal Spanish Academy of Pharmacy Award. Prof. Marrero-Ponce has also been included in the list of the top 2% of world researchers in all 22 fields of science.
