The Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB, or formally "SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics") is an academic not-for-profit foundation which federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland. The SIB was established on 30 March 1998 and its mission is to provide core bioinformatics resources to the life science research community in fields such as genomics, proteomics and systems biology and to coordinate the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland. In particular, the SIB promotes research, develop databanks and computer technologies, and is involved with teaching and service activities.
The SIB is a federation of research groups with affiliated bioinformaticians at the SIB partner institutions: the Universities of Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, Berne and Zurich, the Federal Institutes of Technology in Lausanne and Zurich, the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research. Current research groups in the SIB are located in Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, Bern and Zurich.
The SIB includes researchs and service groups in the fields of proteomics, transcriptomics, genomics, systems biology, structural bioinformatics, evolutionary bioinformatics, modelling, imaging, biophysics and population genetics. It develops and maintains several biological databases, including the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot annotated protein database, neXtProt, a human-centric protein knowledge platform and STRING, a database of known and predicted protein interactions, as well as software such as Melanie or SWISS-MODEL. The ExPASy server, mirrored in several countries worldwide, is dedicated to the analysis of protein sequences and structures as well as 2-D PAGE.
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 propose the creation of the SIB. After its creation, 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, who was followed between 2001 and September 2007 by Ernest Feytmans. Since 1 October 2007, the institute is led by Ron Appel, one of its founding members.
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