The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academicnot-for-profitfoundation which federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland. The institute was established on 30 March 1998 and its mission is to provide core bioinformatics resources to the national and international life science research community in fields such as genomics, proteomics and systems biology as well as to lead and coordinate the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland. In particular, it promotes research, develops databanks and computer technologies, and is involved in teaching and service activities.
History
The institute was originally created to provide a framework for stable long-term funding for both the Swiss-Prot database and the Swiss EMBnet node. Swiss-Prot in particular went through a major funding crisis in 1996, which led the leaders of the five research groups active in bioinformatics in Geneva and Lausanne, Ron Appel, Amos Bairoch, Philipp Bucher, Victor Jongeneel and Manuel Peitsch to create SIB. Once created, the institute could then apply for funding under a Swiss law that allows the government to fund up to 50% of expenses of vital research and teaching infrastructures. The first director of the institute was Victor Jongeneel followed by Ernest Feytmans between 2001 and September 2007. Since 1 October 2007, the institute is led by Ron Appel, one of its founding members.
The institute offers a wide range of resources for the life science research community, most being accessible through ExPASy, the SIB bioinformatics resource portal. They include:
SIB develops and supplies software for the global life science research community, such as SWISS-MODEL, SwissDock/EADock, ISA, PPA, Melanie, MSight, OMA, DeepView/Swiss-PdbViewer, and Newick utilities.
Core facilities
SIB manages several bioinformatics core facilities that provide informatics and statistical support, as well as services and advice to life scientists, thus enabling them to conduct their research projects and analyse the resulting data. Core facilities have been set up for genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics research. SIB also maintains the Vital-IT High Performance Computing Centre that provides computational resources, development support and consultancy to the Swiss lifescience community both in academia and industry. The Vital-IT infrastructure is distributed to three sites: University of Lausanne, EPFL and University of Geneva. Compute resources and bioinformatics expertise are also provided in the Basel area with sciCORE 2, the Basel Computational Biology Center.
Education and training
One of SIB’s priorities is to promote and coordinate education in bioinformatics. SIB members are directly, or indirectly, involved in a number of bioinformatics courses at all educational levels – from high school to undergraduate and graduate degrees – as well as in specialized training for life scientists. SIB also promotes a PhD Training Network in bioinformatics, which is open to graduate students at Swiss schools of higher education. The objectives of this network are two-fold:
To offer graduate students in bioinformatics a set of cutting-edge courses that provide both the theoretical and the practical knowledge necessary to work on a successful PhD research project in bioinformatics.
To foster the development of a network of PhD students and promote the exchange of ideas, as well as the mobility of the students between participating institutions.
Popular science
The SIB is also involved in bringing bioinformatics to the layman. Understanding the growing importance this relatively recent science has in today’s society is becoming fundamental. Indeed, in not too distant a future, patients will be referring to results directly generated by bioinformatics methods. Since the year 2000, in order to heighten public awareness, the SIB has taken part in numerous science fairs, created two online magazines, an outdoor exhibition and, in 2012, a virtual exhibition.
