Wednesday, 08 May 2013

Protein Spotlight Update: the taste of sweet

Humans have always sought to make life sweeter. In prehistoric times, sugar cane was already being grown for its sweetening powers, and the sugar added to beverages and food. But why do humans like what is sweet so much? This may well have evolved from our distant ancestors, as far back as those who bore little resemblance to us. In the wild, animals have to depend on colour but also taste – and its very close sister, smell – to distinguish what is edible from what is likely to be toxic. ... More

Friday, 12 April 2013

A unique Health Science Competence Center is coming to Fribourg

The blueFactory Technology Park in Fribourg is currently witnessing the construction of a competence center which will provide academics and clinicians with the latest equipment and highly specialised expert knowledge in the area of the health sciences. To this end the University of Fribourg is establishing a limited company, the Swiss Integrative Center for Human Health (SICHH), which will begin operating in spring 2013. SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is proud to be part of this new v... More

Thursday, 04 April 2013

Protein Spotlight Update: the silence within

There can be little worse than seeing – and feeling - your own child retreat into a world that doesn’t involve yours. Especially at a period of life when contact with a mother and a father is such a vital component of an infant’s development. And such a pleasurable one for the parents. Autism hits about one child in a thousand – although the contours of the affliction remain a little hazy. There are many forms. Some more serious than others. Some widespread while others are rare, or e... More

Wednesday, 27 March 2013

SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics: 15 years old, still growing and projects for the future

On March 30, the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics will celebrate its 15th anniversary. Since its creation in 1998, the institute has grown exponentially and is now represented by almost 40 groups located within Switzerland’s major Universities and Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology. SIB develops resources used by researchers all over the world and its expertise is requested within the framework of many Swiss and international research projects. Bioinformatics is expanding at... More

Tuesday, 26 March 2013

A deeper look on brain ageing: Further Study on Late-Onset Alzheimer Disease, the most common type of dementia

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics will be one of the actors of a recently launched Aging Systems Biology project (AgedBrainSysBio), a European collaborative research project funded by the European Commission under the Health Work Programme of the 7th Framework Programme. The consortium which gathers 14 academic and industrial partners from different countries will combine their efforts to study human brain ageing and Alzheimer’s disease, the most common type of dementia, a chronic a... More

Friday, 08 March 2013

SIB commissioned by the FAO and IAEA to develop an e-learning module on animal viral pathogens

SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics has been commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) joint program to produce an e-learning module on the phylogenetics of viral pathogens of domestic animals, to train veterinarians and biologists.This development was initiated following numerous requests for bioinformatics training by animal health diagnostic laboratories in developing countries. Data analysis has in... More

Thursday, 07 March 2013

Zoltan Kutalik shares the 2013 Leenaards Award for the promotion of scientific research

This year, the Leenaards Foundation awards two projects in translational biomedical research. One of them will suppport Zoltan Kutalik, from the Computational Biology group at SIB and UNIL, Pierre-Yves Bochud (UNIL-CHUV), Christian Van Gelden (HUG and UNIGE) and Oscar Marchetti (UNIL-CHUV) who will combine their expertise to find new approaches in the diagnosis and treatment of fungal infections.Fungal infections are frequent life-threatening complications in the hospital setting. Candida is... More

Tuesday, 19 February 2013

Supercomputers should find selection events in the genes and thus shed more light on evolution

In the HP2C project “Selectome”, scientists from the University of Lausanne and the SIB Institute of Bioinformatics and members of CSCS have successfully revised a code. It now also runs on supercomputers and calculates selection events in genes many times more quickly. More information More

Tuesday, 12 February 2013

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, GeneBio and Quartz Bio Unveil a Collaboration on MegaClust

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva Bioinformatics (GeneBio) SA and Quartz Bio SA today announced the establishment of a long-term collaboration under which they will cooperate in order to develop, use and jointly promote MegaClust, the SIB platform for the analysis of flow cytometry data. More More

Tuesday, 05 February 2013

The Interim ELIXIR Board is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Niklas Blomberg to the newly created post of ELIXIR Founding Director.

Hinxton, 5 Feb 2013 ELIXIR, the pan-European infrastructure for biological information, officially entered its implementation phase in January 2013. ELIXIR’s core objective is to ensure that Europe can continue to handle a rapidly growing volume and variety of data from high-throughput experiments such as DNA sequencing. Proper management of this information promotes knowledge-based economic growth and facilitates the translation of research into innovations that meet global challenges in f... More

Friday, 01 February 2013

SIB honours three young bioinformaticians for their outstanding research work

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics announced the winners of the SIB Awards 2012 during its annual internal meeting – the SIB Days – on 29 January 2013. The SIB Young Bioinformatician Award and the SIB Best Graduate Paper Award, respectively doted with a cash prize of CHF 10'000 and CHF 5’000, are given yearly by SIB to recognise two excellent young bioinformaticians. From left to right:  Christophe Zechner, Jacob Ruess and Christophe DessimozSIB Young Bioinformatician Award 2012... More

Wednesday, 16 January 2013

Fire ant: a gene for dictating social behaviour

Why is it that some insects do not have the same social behaviour within the same species? The phenomenon is frequently observed yet has remained un-explained until recently when research carried out on a particularly devastating species of ant - the fire ant – by the biologist Laurent Keller at the University of Lausanne and by the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics demonstrated that differences in colony organisation were the doings of a “social chromosome”. The results of the rese... More

Thursday, 10 January 2013

Chromosomewalk.ch now in English!

Here it is - The English translation of www.chromosomewalk.ch is online.What is chromosomewalk.ch? In a nutshell, visitors are introduced to the world of DNA and proteins - and indirectly to the world of bioinformatics - by going on an interactive and recreational journey into the heart of our chromosomes. As such, visitors enter the exhibition at the level of a cell's nucleus and its chromosomes. From chromosome to chromosome, and gene to gene, answers are given to questions such as 'what is... More

Tuesday, 08 January 2013

Protein Spotlight Update: unusual liaisons

Sex for procreation. It doesn’t sound in the least bit eccentric. But how about sex between a flower and an insect? We all know that flowers depend very much on insects to perpetuate their species. It is their answer to a lack of legs or wings. Consequently, over the millennia, plants have devised the most creative ways of luring insects into the places where they keep pollen. Some flowers have thought up shapes that resemble an insect’s mate, or places that are ideal for shelter, or they... More