Geneva, Switzerland
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics announced today that Professor Amos Bairoch, the creator of the world-renowned protein database Swiss-Prot (now known as UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot ), has been proposed to direct a new SIB group, CALIPHO, as of July 1, 2009. This new group’s main project is to develop an innovative knowledge resource centred on human proteins, building on the expertise gained by the Swiss-Prot group. Prof. Bairoch will remain senior scientific advisor to the Swiss-Prot group. Dr. Ioannis Xenarios, who is also Group Leader of Vital-IT at SIB, will become the Director of Swiss-Prot, from July 1, 2009.

By creating the new CALIPHO group, which stands for "Computer and Laboratory Investigation of Proteins of Human Origin", the SIB aims to help advance knowledge on human proteins. The three missions of CALIPHO are the development of a human protein knowledge database, discovering the function of selected sets of uncharacterized proteins of human origin through laboratory experiments, and organising a collective effort to pool available resources around the world in order to functionally characterise all these proteins.

Paying tribute to Prof. Bairoch’s achievements over the last 23 years, SIB Director, Professor Ron Appel said, “Amos has made an enormous contribution to life science worldwide since he launched this resource in 1986 – there is hardly a life science researcher today who doesn’t use UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot on a daily basis. With this new venture a new chapter in computational biology commences.”

“Also, I am delighted that Ioannis Xenarios accepted to take over the direction of Swiss-Prot,” Prof. Appel continued. “We sought an outstanding leader to sustain the SIB’s major commitment to UniProt and in Ioannis, we have this person, and also someone who will bring a wealth of new ideas.”

Rolf Apweiler, the UniProt Principal Investigator at the EMBL-EBI, said “We are lucky to have Ioannis Xenarios to take over the leadership of the Swiss-Prot group in Geneva. This will build on our existing 22-year-old collaboration. Amos will remain a scientific advisor to the group so we will have the benefit of the ideas that Ioannis will bring in addition to Amos’ vision and experience.”

The new CALIPHO group will be part of and will work in close collaboration with the University of Geneva, where all of the experimental laboratory activities will be carried out. Collaborations with other groups at the University of Geneva, the University of Lausanne, the EPFL, as well as laboratories outside of Switzerland, notably in France, Canada, Argentina, Korea and China are either on-going or planned. Prof. Bairoch will share CALIPHO operational responsibility with Dr. Lydie Lane.

“The strength of CALIPHO will lie in the powerful combination of bioinformatics, biocuration and wet lab skills that will be targeted towards the goal of speeding up the discovery of the functions of human proteins and the role that they play inside our body. By working in close scientific collaboration, the Swiss-Prot and CALIPHO groups will advance towards new ways of generating knowledge from the enormous mass of information which is now available to life scientists,” said Amos Bairoch.

UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot is a unique resource for life scientists. From its origins as a small academic project, it has grown to an essential, world-renowned resource which is part of the UniProt consortium. Every day, ten of thousands of scientists use UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot which contains detailed and manually crafted description of about 500,000 proteins. By naming Ioannis Xenarios as new director of the Swiss-Prot group, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics reiterates its commitment to this consortium. Dr. Xenarios will share Swiss-Prot operational responsibility with Dr. Lydie Bougueleret.

Dr. Xenarios, who will continue to manage Vital-IT, an innovative life science bioinformatics initiative that provides computational resources, expertise and training to connect fundamental and applied research, added “By bringing together the Swiss-Prot and Vital-IT groups under the same guidance we are creating a unique resource for the scientific community. We will bring together the content (Swiss-Prot knowledge), the tools (algorithmic development and optimization from Vital-IT) and the infrastructure (Vital-IT).”

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Amos Bairoch

Professor of Bioinformatics and chairman of the Department of Structural Biology and Bioinformatics at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva, Amos Bairoch is head of the Swiss-Prot group of the SIB. The Swiss-Prot Group develops the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot knowledgebase together with other members of the UniProt consortium. He also created the PROSITE and ENZYME databases both of which are also developed by the SIB Swiss-Prot group. He was the developer of the PC/Gene sequence analysis software package used worldwide by more than 2,000 laboratories in the 80s and 90s. Prof. Bairoch is also co-responsible for the development of ExPASy, the world’s first web site dedicated to protein sciences.
 

Ioannis Xenarios

Ioannis Xenarios is serving as the Director of Vital-IT, a high performance-computing centre dedicated to life science research, managed by the SIB. He received a PhD in immunology at the Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research and the Institute of Biochemistry, University of Lausanne. He worked on the development of the Database of Interacting Proteins (DIP) under the supervision of Prof. David Eisenberg at the University of California Los Angeles. He then became the head of Translational Bioinformatics at Merck Serono, where his group developed computational methodologies in the area of proteomics, microarray and genetics. He is one of the Principal investigators of the ENFIN project aiming at providing methods in dynamical systems modelling. He participated in several efforts in the Proteomics Standard Initiative under the HUPO.
 

About SIB

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation federating bioinformatics activities throughout
Switzerland. Its mission is to provide essential services and support to the national and international life science community,
through databases, software, Web servers and core facilities, as well as teaching and research activities in the field of
bioinformatics. It has a long-standing tradition of producing state-of-the-art software for the life science research community, as
well as carefully annotated databases including UniProtKB/ Swiss-Prot, the world’s most widely used source of information about
proteins. The SIB includes world-class research and service groups in the fields of proteomics, transcriptomics, genomics, systems
biology, structural bioinformatics, evolutionary bioinformatics, modelling, imaging, biophysics, and population genetics in Geneva,
Lausanne, Berne, Basel and Zurich. SIB expertise is widely appreciated and its services are used by life science researchers
worldwide.

Contact

Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Janice Blondeau, Head of Communications
Quartier Sorge, Bâtiment Génopode / CH-1015 Lausanne / Switzerland
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