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SIB - Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

SWISS BIOINFORMATICS

SIB NEWSLETTER - APRIL 2017

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Prof. Ron Appel
SIB Executive Director

EDITORIAL

2017 started well at SIB, with encouraging marks of recognition.
At the national level, the Swiss government decided to renew its financial support to our Institute for 2017-2020, as well as to provide funding to support SIB’s central activities within the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN). Beyond our borders, SIB is also representing Switzerland in European and global coalitions, to find ways of ensuring the long-term sustainability of essential life science infrastructure.
Such marks of recognition prompt me to recall what makes up the DNA of our Institute, which has grown steadily since its creation.
SIB’s raison d’être is to offer essential resources and competence centres, such as UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot or Vital-IT, to the global life science community. This wealth of knowledge and expertise accelerates research in all fields of life sciences, and is playing a key role in personalized health projects. Our Institute also brings together nearly 800 bioinformatics researchers in Switzerland – 200 of whom are employed by SIB – and provides the life science community with cutting-edge training in computational biology.
Welcome to this April 2017 edition of Swiss Bioinformatics.

TAKING THE PULSE OF SIB

SIB is part of a global coalition to sustain core data resources

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Time is running out for data resources of crucial importance for the life sciences, medicine and our society. Whether it is DNA sequence repositories or protein knowledgebases, their sustainability is being jeopardized in several ways. One of them is short-term financing schemes. SIB is part of an international coalition to address this very issue, as announced last month in Nature.

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The new SIB Profile is out

The last year has been full of developments for SIB, from biocuration, with SIB hosting the 9th International Biocuration Conference, to several projects in personalized health and many more scientific advances made possible by computational biology approaches. Find out all of our 2016 highlights in our latest activity report.

Link to electronic version
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Join us on social media

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If you are not yet one of our followers on Twitter (1,448 followers), Facebook (2,750), LinkedIn (3,536) or YouTube (154), join the growing SIB community and interact with us on our social media channels. An efficient way to stay tuned into our activities, news or videos!

FOCUS ON PERSONALIZED HEALTH

Launch of the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN)

At the end of 2016, the Swiss government decided to allocate the funds to be managed by SIB in the context of SPHN. Torsten Schwede is Head of SIB’s Personalized Health Informatics group, which is spearheading, since January 2017, the Institute’s efforts as SPHN’s Data Coordination Centre.

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Videos – SIB and personalized health

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Discover the role played by SIB in several health-related endeavours, both at the national scale, with the activities of the SIB Clinical Bioinformatics group and the key role of the Institute in the Swiss Personalized Health Network, and internationally, with a European partnership established to fight diabetes.

Watch the videos

OncobenchTM: one day gained to fight cancer

When it comes to fighting cancer, obtaining a diagnosis a day earlier, as well as saving one full day per week of clinical lab professionals’ precious time, can have important benefits for patients, hospitals and health insurance alike. This and other advances have been made possible by a tool developed by SIB and the Clinical Pathology Service of the Geneva University Hospitals (HUG), according to a recent satisfaction survey.

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RESEARCH AT SIB

Predicting the geographic spread of avian flu

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A multidisciplinary team of researchers, including SIB’s Swiss-Prot and Vital-IT groups, the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), have published the first global model to predict where the highly pathogenic avian influenza is likely to spread once introduced. Discover the variables on which the model is based.

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Why am I shorter than you?

The answer to that question lies to some extent in our diet and environment, but mostly in our DNA (80%). A recent study narrowed down the set of candidate changes to 83 variants, some of which alter size by more than 2 cm. Over 300 scientists, including SIB Group Leaders Zoltán Kutalik, co-Principal Investigator of the paper, and Sven Bergmann, combined their efforts to study what makes us shorter or taller.

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SIB accelerates the fight against diabetes

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The discovery of molecules that could detect type 2 diabetes up to nine years before its diagnosis is the result of a pan-European collaborative project, IMIDIA, in which SIB has been closely involved since 2010. This and other advances are featured in two recent publications marking the success of the project, a public-private partnership of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).

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BIOINFORMATICS FOR ALL

Tomorrow’s drugs at your fingertips

Developed by SIB researchers, training and outreach officers, the Drug Design Workshop – an online teaching platform based on professional tools – has already led over 1,500 people on a journey to design the drugs of tomorrow. It has recently received additional funding from Agora, the Swiss National Science Foundation funding scheme for scientific communication, to be further expanded. A walk-through of the concept for educators is available online.

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Save the date(s) for a family outing!

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SIB will be bringing data science to the public on several upcoming occasions. Join us on 20-21 May at the University of Lausanne’s annual open house, around activities coined “Draw me a new drug”; on 20 May at “La Nuit des Musées”, at the Musée d’Histoire des Sciences in Geneva, to uncover the different species hidden in a birthday cake; and on 16 May, at the preview of the “Science images” exhibition’s at the Musée d’Histoire des Sciences in Geneva to discover visuals from the bioinformatics world.

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Latest Protein Spotlight: Something else

Knives were crafted to cut. Yet how many of us use them to slit an envelope. Or prise open a lid. Nature too has its ways of perverting a design so that its initial role is altered to become another. This is exactly what happened to a protein known as osteocrin. Osteocrin was first discovered in bone. Almost a decade later, scientists found out that it is also expressed in the primate brain…

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