SWISS BIOINFORMATICS

Our activity report for the past year is hot from the press and has: perspective articles on areas where SIB will be adding value for the years to come, a year of anniversary projects and events; a focus on our activities dedicated to personalized health; key research outcomes and updates from our 70 Groups…

Are you a bioinformatician with a remarkable early career, a graduate student who published an outstanding paper or did you develop a resource with an important impact on the life science community? The SIB Awards will be presented for the 10^th time in 2019 at the [BC]² conference: don’t miss this chance to boost your research profile. If you are wondering whether the award is cut for you, get inspired by reading the interviews with previous laureates…

A new Internal Group, Core-IT, is now bringing SIB’s existing IT-related expertise under one roof, with a specific focus on data protection, quality assurance and information security. Together with the recognized excellence of Vital-IT in bioinformatics services and research support, SIB is thus expanding its offer to address the complete computational needs of today’s life scientists…

Each year with the Overton Prize, the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) recognizes the outstanding achievements of an early to mid-career scientist who has made a significant contribution to the field of computational biology. The 2019 laureate is Christophe Dessimoz, SIB Group Leader and member of the Board of Directors, SNSF Professor at the University of Lausanne in the field of comparative genomics…

A European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant has been awarded to SIB Group Leader Michel Milinkovitch for his research project entitled "Identifying how Evolution exploits physical properties of tissues to generate the complexity and diversity of Life (EVOMORPHYS)”…

Personalized healthcare requires a solid foundation; establishing interoperability of biomedical information and building a national infrastructure provides such a basis. It is with this conviction that Katrin Crameri took over the reins of SIB’s Personalized Health Informatics Group in Basel on 1 March from Torsten Schwede, who has been appointed Vice President for Research at the University of Basel. Torsten and Katrin shared their vision…

To promote the development of personalized health research, the Swiss Confederation launched in 2017 the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN). In parallel, the BioMedIT project was funded to establish a coordinated network of core facilities at Swiss universities for the secure processing of biomedical data. Here is an overview of the BioMedIT project, coordinated by SIB’s Personalized Health Informatics Group…

The Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) initiative, in which SIB plays a key role, joins an international group of 22 leading genomic data initiatives working together to enable sharing of genomic and health-related data for research. The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) has selected SPHN among its “2019 Driver Projects” that aim to develop and pilot standards for sharing genomic and health-related data…

How does this insect, which is an important model species, feed on poisonous milkweed seeds and use the acquired toxins for its own protection and bright red warning colouration? To explore these phenomena, an international study including SIB Researchers at the Universities of Lausanne and of Geneva sequenced the milkweed bug genome and carried out extensive comparisons with other insects, using SIB orthology resources…

A new method to analyze genetic data, developed by two SIB Groups, shows that the relationships between living species, from bacteria to plants and animals, are different from previous estimates. Created by the group led by Nicolas Salamin and the Bioinformatics Core Facility at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and SIB, the new software will change what we know about the tree of life. The study is published in the journal PNAS…

Maintained and developed in the Group of Vincent Zoete and Olivier Michielin (University of Lausanne), the SIB Resource SwissDrugDesign is a platform of tools dedicated to computer-aided drug design. On 16 December 2018, the count of total jobs run on the platform passed the symbolic one-million mark, highlighting a remarkable acceleration of usage over the past years. The Group Leaders told us more about the milestone and the tools…

SIB is lending its expertise in data management to the FAIRplus project, aiming to increase the discovery, accessibility and reusability of data from selected projects funded by the European Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), as well as internal data from pharmaceutical industry partners…

A study led by the EPFL team of Elisa Oricchio and the SIB team of Giovanni Ciriello (University of Lausanne) shows how a mutated gene can affect the three-dimensional interactions of genes in the cell, leading to various forms of cancer...

The CINECA project, led by EMBL-EBI, aims to unite more than a million human data sets from across Africa, Canada and Europe. SIB is among the initiative’s 18 partner organizations, with the Group of Patrick Ruch at HES-SO bringing its text mining and automated annotation expertise to help uncover clinically relevant information…

The list of courses scheduled for the next 6 months is now available online, covering topics such as: NGS genome variant analysis, NGS quality control, alignment and visualisation, R Shiny, Long-reads sequencing, Data Carpentry, Statistical Modelling, Single-cell RNAseq... 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!

Following the success of the first edition, the University Hospital of Basel is launching the second edition of this one of the kind CAS (Certificate of Advanced Studies) with SIB and the University Hospital of Lausanne. Coordinated by SIB Clinical Bioinformatics, this training takes place at a key point in time and matches the growing interest for personalized medicine, as exemplified by initiatives such as the Swiss Personalized Health Network…

We are all bound to become prey, predator or competitor one day. Whichever way you look at it. That is why, over time, all living beings have acquired their very own palette of defence mechanisms. Roses grow thorns. Bacteria fire toxins. Panthers run fast, chameleons blend into the environment and humans hurl a few well-chosen words. The whole point of developing such mechanisms is to shun the threat of some sort of insult, or worse: death…