VIB Bioinformatics Core

Published Date: July 16th, 2018: IPA© is a powerful web-based knowledge base system designed for biologists.

E-Notebook (ELN) was introduced at VIB in 2010. Since then many research groups and core facilities adopted the system and now use it on a regular basis.

In order to keep up with the new MS Windows environment and MS Office versions, we plan to upgrade the current version of E-Notebook to the latest and greatest. PerkinElmer will perform the upgrade in the week of 20-24 August 2018. The application will therefore not be available on the first 3-4 days of the week. We will try to limit the downtime to a minimum and will inform you when the application is back online.

The new E-Notebook manual will be published soon. For more information or if you have any questions, mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Published Date: July 17th, 2018: IPA© is a powerful web-based knowledge base system designed for biologists.

HELIS Academy: improving the ‘industry readiness’ of Life Sciences & Health students

In April 2018, HELIS Academy was launched. Funded by Interreg Vlaanderen-Nederland (EU), the project’s main aim is to bridge the gap between the competences required for jobs in the Life Sciences & Health sector and the existing training programmes.

The project is executed by ten Dutch and Flemish partners from academia and industry, including VIB represented by the VIB Bioinformatics Core. The Dutch-Flemish collaboration aims to assess the teaching and training needs of Life Sciences & Health companies in the Netherlands and Flanders. In addition, the partners will develop and offer courses to help students acquire the desired skills and competences. HELIS Academy will focus on the general ‘industry readiness’ of students in Life Sciences & Health at all levels of education. In addition, it will focus on specific skills for certain types of jobs within the sector.

More information

• Information about HELIS Academy on the Interreg website (in Dutch)
• HELIS Academy flyer

HELIS Academy is gefinancierd binnen het Interreg V-programma Vlaanderen-Nederland, het grensoverschrijdend samenwerkingsprogramma met financiële steun van het Europees Fonds voor Regionale Ontwikkeling. Meer info: www.grensregio.eu

Published Date: April 16, 2018: GENEVESTIGATOR is an innovative online platform enabling researchers to globally explore public and proprietary expression data for research and clinical applications.

Last December we organized the community meeting on bioinformatics and computational biology. Now we want to encourage a more specific field by organizing a meeting for software developers and programmers. These VIB Developers Meetings will be more interactive, more focussed on specific topics and will be organized on rotating locations.

Together with Demet Turan and Niels Hulstaert (CompOmics lab) we organise the first developers meeting on Wednesday 28 March 2018 at the VIB Center for Medical Biotechnology in Ghent.

If you want to register for this meeting, please complete the registration form on this link before 25 March.

Published Date: December 22nd, 2017: IPA© is a powerful web-based knowledge base system designed for biologists.

Paula Andrea Martinez joins us in December. Paula is a data scientist with background in bioinformatics. She worked at The University of Queensland, Australia as specialized trainer for data analysis and data visualization. She is part of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry as instructor, maintainer, mentor and trainer. ELIXIR Belgium, is welcoming Paula in the training platform as trainer. Within the ELIXIR Belgium framework, courses in providing FAIR data and applying data management strategies as well as workshops of the pipelining tool Galaxy and software best practices (data carpentry) will be developed. We look forward to connecting and learning from each other. Please visit Paula personal web site, the ELIXIR Belgium and our ELIXIR web page for more information and planning of courses. We will inform about events also via our twitter account @vibbioinfocore.

We are very happy to welcome Oren who joins the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Initiative at VIB.

Oren's research and main scientific motivation is driven by the fundamental challenge to uncover the link between genes and functions, and filling the gaps in our current biological knowledge via application and implementation of computational algorithms tailored to handle big data. As such, he has spent considerate amount of time developing user-friendly platforms and interfaces for construction and analysis of regulatory networks of genes from specific plant metabolic pathways (Tzfadia et al., 2012, Tzfadia et al., 2016 and Itkin et al., 2013).

Novel, powerful computational approaches such as machine learning, guilt by association, and statistically robust bioinformatic methods combined with the rapidly increasing availability of ‘omics’ data sets (e.g., genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and fluxomics), provides the potential for integrating various layers of data sets for extending our biological knowledge.

With specific aim to make integrative biology accessible for the biologists research community, and provide a platform to integrate multiple data sources in a holistic manner, Oren will lead the development and implementation efforts of integrative bioinformatics infrastructure, algorithms, and software tools development at the VIB Bioinformatics Core. His emphasis will be on integration of data from research activities across VIB centers and Core facilities.

The second VIB Community Meeting on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology will take place on 12 December 2017 in Brussels. In order to create a strong bioinformatics community, flash presentations of PhD students and postdocs in the field of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics are organized. During the afternoon, two parallel sessions are included, one on NGS/single-cell, Proteomics, Integrative Bioinformatics, and one on Developed@VIB. More information and registration on this link.