SWISS BIOINFORMATICS

[BC]² is one of Europe’s major bioinformatics and computational biology events, and SIB’s annual scientific meeting. Discover the programme and speakers – including Susan Holmes (Stanford School of Medicine, USA), Roy Kishony (Israel Institute of Technology, ISR), and Danielle Posthuma (Vrije Universiteit, NLD) – and grasp the last seats at the tutorials and workshops on machine learning, single-cell, deep learning and many more topics.

In view of the complexity and diversity of the projects led by SIB and the expansion of its activities involving sensitive data (BioMedIT, SPHN projects, collaborations with hospitals), it has created a Data Protection and Security Board to ensure a global vision with multidisciplinary skills. The Board is composed of experts in the legal, data protection, cybersecurity, information technology, clinical- and broad bioinformatics domains. Its mission is to devise a strategy, policies and regulations pertaining to personal sensitive data and information security at SIB and to supervise their enforcement.

Thanks to the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) initiative, Switzerland is currently shifting from a fragmented health data landscape to a coordinated infrastructure enabling personalized health research. But how does this translate for the scientists themselves? Follow the steps of a researcher aiming to identify new biomarkers of lung cancer and discover in this context the concrete role of SIB’s BioMedIT secure infrastructure...

In this first talk of the series, SIB Group Leader Niko Beerenwinkel (ETH Zurich) tells you how to mine viral genomes to improve clinical diagnostics using V-pipe, a new SIB resource to analyze viral sequencing data. Who is it for? Scientists who analyze virus sequencing data in basic research or clinical settings, bioinformaticians embedded in clinical research groups, staff of bioinformatics core units… 

Just a few days after the IPBES’ global biodiversity assessment was presented in Paris, SIB Scientists at the University of Lausanne published a paper explaining the origin of the biodiversity observed among beetles, arguably the largest species richness in the animal kingdom. The international study, published in Genome Biology, employed SIB bioinformatics resources BUSCOs and OrthoDB…

A dietary supplementation with Urolithin A, a pomegranate metabolite, could help slow down certain aging processes by improving mitochondrial and cellular health in humans: this is the finding of a clinical trial published in the journal Nature Metabolism by EPFL spin-off Amazentis, in conjunction with EPFL and SIB Scientists in the Vital-IT Group who helped analyze the data…

Two 31,000-year-old milk teeth from an excavation site in northeastern Siberia have led to the discovery of a previously unknown population that lived in the area during the last ice age. SIB Group Leader Laurent Excoffier from the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern was involved in the discovery of these "Ancient North Siberians"…

Phylogenetic trees built from the genomes of strains of a bacterial species do not mean what most people think they do. This is what Erik van Nimwegen, SIB Group Leader and Associate Professor in Computational Systems Biology at the Biozentrum (University of Basel), sets out to demonstrate in his intriguing and thought-provoking talk…

Save the date for your favorite courses among the following topics: NGS technologies (Introduction to RNA-seq, Single-cell RNA-seq, Long read sequencing), drug design, Data Carpentry, statistics (Basic statistics, Statistical modelling), languages (R, UNIX, Python, Git for reproducible research, Best practices)… Subscribe to the courses' mailing-list to be notified 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…

Diversity is one of Nature's fortes. See how she has spread life and let it flow into Earth's every nook and cranny: oceans and seas, rivers and lakes, woodland, forests and jungles, mountains, valleys, deserts, marshland and glaciers, and even stifled cities where weeds push their way through bricks - and flies, rats and pigeons feed on our waste. Though humans seem set on diminishing diversity, there is still a…