SWISS BIOINFORMATICS

Since 1998, one of the core missions of SIB has been to provide life scientists in Switzerland and beyond with essential biological encyclopaedias, databases and tools.
A flagship example is the world reference for protein sequence and function, UniProt, whose expert curated section is mainly maintained and developed by SIB’s Swiss-Prot Group.
Such resources are used daily by scientists around the world to foster innovation and improve human wellbeing. However, with over 60% of all life science databases benefiting from less than one year of funding, ensuring their financial sustainability is a matter of growing international concern.
In our last newsletter, we announced that SIB had joined forces with a global coalition to ensure the long-term sustainability of core data resources. A first revolutionary proposal was drafted by this coalition earlier this month – if approved, it could lead to nothing short of a breakthrough for data resource management in the future.
A distinguished SIB scientist, an update on the personalized health front and the secret of a lizard’s colour as well as SIB’s latest popular science events are among the other headlines of this June edition of Swiss Bioinformatics.

What if the funding for data resources was channelled through a common pot rather than in a fragmented way as is the case today? This is, in essence, the revolutionary proposal made by the Global Life Sciences Data Resources (GLSDR) coalition to the Heads of International Research Organizations (HIROs). It results from a two-day workshop, where SIB and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) represented Switzerland…

Entrepreneurs, scientists, journalists, artists... Each year, the Forum des 100 lists and brings together 100 personalities who contribute to the dynamism and spirit of innovation of Western Switzerland.
Prof. Ioannis Xenarios is among the laureates of the 13^th edition held on 11 May at the University of Lausanne and dedicated to health – from Big Data to personalized medicine.

Registration is now open for the key computational biology event of the year in Switzerland! This edition of [BC]² will take place on 13-15 September in Basel and offers a great line-up of keynote speakers and conference tracks. [BC]² is SIB’s biennial scientific symposium, organized in collaboration with the Biozentrum University of Basel. It brings together scientists working in bioinformatics, neuroscience, medicine...

To enable research projects to collaborate and share data across Swiss hospitals and research institutions: this is the overarching aim of SIB’s Personalized Health Informatics Group, which builds up the Data Coordination Centre of the SPHN initiative. The project has now started to onboard experts in data management and data security. To learn more about SIB’s role in SPHN, explore the initiative’s new website.

How can bioinformatics help physicians in taking medical decisions? This question was the focus of a C-Suite event, which took place at the Biopôle in Lausanne on 13 June. Torsten Schwede, Head of SIB’s Personalized Health Informatics group, was among the speakers and presented the role of the group in the Swiss Personalized Health Network initiative.

Find out how SIB Group Leader Michel Milinkovitch and colleagues have unlocked the mystery behind the skin colour pattern of the ocellated lizard in a study published in Nature...

Predicting when and how species arise is now possible with a new theoretical model using genome-wide data, developed by SIB researcher Simon Aeschbacher and colleagues. The study was published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…

‘Build a 3D virtual/augmented reality app to help understand life science.’ With this goal in mind, the 16 participants in SIB’s first bioinformatics hackathon put their heads together to gamify science on 13-14 May 2017 at the Campus Biotech in Geneva. After a brief introduction, a few croissants and many more coffees, the teams came up with a range of exciting projects…

Over 650 people, including school classes, took part in our outreach activities around bioinformatics as part of the University of Lausanne’s Open House (Mystères de l’UNIL) and the Night of the Museums in Geneva, on 18-21 May. The two events were a great success…

There are times when things are so gloomy it is difficult for light to shine through. We can create our own light or adapt to the lack of it. In Nature, fish live in the sea or fresh water. Rivers, however, can be turbid, and freshwater fish use visual systems that differ from those of marine fish. What about fish that live in both environments? An enzyme could be the key…