SWISS BIOINFORMATICS

A venerable tree that protects itself from the weight of years, tackling the short-term financing threat faced by life science resources, recent advances in the Swiss Personalized Health Network initiative, the launch of the first Swiss Certificate of Advanced Studies in personalized molecular oncology, and much more.
Discover how SIB continues to provide life scientists and clinicians with a complete bioinformatics infrastructure, and to create a strong community of experts. 
And with this last issue of Swiss Bioinformatics for the year, we wish you all a very happy festive season!

"Biocuration by human experts will remain central to the development of high-quality knowledgebases": discover Alan Bridge's thoughts and views on the future of biocuration as he takes up the Co-Director role of one of the largest SIB groups…

Amos Bairoch, SIB Co-Founder and Group Leader of the CALIPHO group, is the 2018 winner of the award for Outstanding Contributions to Biomolecular Technologies of the prestigious Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF). The award will be presented at the…

Designed to promote the development of personalized health in Switzerland, the SPHN initiative will lay the foundations to foster research projects in this area, including mechanisms facilitating the nationwide exchange of health-related data. In this context, SIB has been mandated to run SPHN's Data Coordination Centre (DCC) and is managing the BioMedIT project.

With projects dedicated to oncology treatment and research as well as inflammatory disease immunotherapy, SIB groups are well represented among the 15 projects selected by the National Steering Board of SPHN…

Developed by the SIB Clinical Bioinformatics group, an implementation plan has been launched to enable Swiss hospitals and SIB to develop a common infrastructure allowing hospitals to share and unify the clinical interpretation of the genetic variants…

Part of SIB’s mission is to provide and maintain databases and software tools, which are of fundamental importance to the wider life-science community.

A recent study by the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and supported by ELIXIR compares existing funding models and identifies a candidate scheme, according to which the costs of core data resources worldwide could be covered by using less than 1% of the total amount already dedicated to research grants in the life sciences.

Bringing to the surface information buried in the figures of scientific papers: this is the purpose of SourceData, an open-access platform developed by EMBO in collaboration with SIB. SourceData allows researchers and publishers to share figures and their underlying data in a machine-readable, searchable format…

A study carried out by researchers at SIB and the University of Lausanne has revealed that the genome of an emblematic tree of the University campus, the Napoleon oak, has changed little during its first 234 years of existence...

Type 2 diabetes, which affects over 500 million people worldwide, results from the inability of pancreatic beta cells to provide the body with enough insulin to maintain healthy levels of blood glucose. As part of the IMIDIA initiative, an international study co-led by SIB scientists has now identified a novel cluster of dysregulated genes in…

Organisms that are expanding their spatial range suffer from a drastic decrease of fitness over time due to the accumulation of harmful mutations. A study published in Genetics led by a team of scientists from SIB and the University of Bern now provides the first experimental…

Over 20 SIB Training events are already scheduled in 2018, with many more yet to come. Topics include: NGS and other omics data analysis, statistics, programming, algorithms for bioinformatics, HPC and several SIB resources. Save the dates in your calendar, subscribe to the courses' mailing-list to be informed when registrations open, and share this information with your colleagues!

The University Hospital of Basel is launching a CAS in personalized molecular oncology with SIB and the University Hospital of Lausanne. Coordinated by SIB Clinical Bioinformatics, this CAS is the first of its kind in Switzerland. It takes place at a key point in time and matches the growing interest for personalized medicine at the national level…

We all depend on cues. Without them, the notion of community would not exist. Cues are the cement of society, and their nature can be very diverse. Birds whistle. Hogs grunt. Plants give off scents. Many other animals have also evolved intricate means of communication. Ants, in particular. Over time, these insects have acquired an advanced form of social behaviour driven by pheromones whose effects are highly dependent on a protein known as...