Your personal risk of developing complex diseases such as diabetes, depression or cancer is influenced in part by genetic variants, that is, letters in your DNA sequence that differ between people. These variants disrupt networks of interacting genes in different tissues of your body, two studies published in Nature Methods and PLoS Computational Biology found. Innovative software tools allowed the scientists to construct accurate “maps” of gene networks for about 400 different human cell and tissue types, ranging from immune cells to brain tissues, whereas previous studies were limited to just one or few tissues. 

Das Universitätsspital Genf (HUG) hat mit dem SIB Schweizerischen Institut für Bioinformatik eine Vereinbahrung abgeschlossen, die es ihm erlaubt, auf dem Gebiet der personalisierten Medizin eine Vorreiterrolle einzunehmen. Ein Abkommen dieser Art ist erstmalig für die Schweiz und ist Teil einer schweizweiten Initiative mit dem Ziel, jedem Patienten mithilfe der Genomik und der klinischen Bioinformatik eine individuellere medizinische Betreuung anbieten zu können.

With the current exponential growth of biomedical data, there is a crucial need to organize and check them, as well as make them accessible to both humans and computers. This activity is called biocuration. Online biocurated databases play a central role in the whole process. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Swiss-Prot – the most widely used protein information resource in the world – Ioannis Xenarios, Head of the Swiss-Prot group at SIB, has been asked about the current and future challenges of the knowledgebase.

The gold standard of protein knowledgebases

UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot is an expertly curated and very low-redundant protein knowledgebase originally created in 1986 under the name of Swiss-Prot. Its mission is to provide the scientific community with a comprehensive, high-quality and freely accessible resource of protein sequence and knowledge. The database sums up all the available information on a given protein in a given species, such as the function, cell location, pathological role, interactions and differences between species.