image: Julien Roux, Professor Ron Appel and Lukas Berger are honored by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. view more
Credit: R. Pohlmann (Biozentrum, Unibas)
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics today announced the winners of the 2009 SIB Best Graduate Paper and the SIB Young Bioinformatician Award at the 7th annual [BC]2 Basel Computational Biology Conference.
**2009 SIB Young Bioinformatician Award **
The winner of the 2009 SIB Young Bioinformatician Award is SIB Member Lukas Burger, 29, who has been working for the past four years with the SIB in the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Group led by Prof. Erik van Nimwegen at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. In his recently obtained PhD thesis, he studied how to predict physical interactions between protein residues entirely based on sequence data, using multiple sequence alignments of similar proteins.
Dr. Burger has developed a new Bayesian network methodology for the characterization of protein sequences that is extremely powerful and allows the prediction of intra- and interprotein interactions with greatly improved accuracy. Dr. Burger explains the importance of such a methodology, "As the number of sequenced genomes has grown exponentially over the last years, multiple alignments of many protein families now contain more than 100 homologous sequences(and some even several thousand), which makes it possible to investigate the evolutionary constraints that act on particular residues in much detail. Such analyses reveal that protein residues are constrained in very complicated ways, with interacting residues forming chains or networks that even connect residues that are distant in the 3-dimensional structure of the protein.
The introduced methodology provides a way of describing these interdependencies in a statistically sound and efficient way and thus provides a generalization of currently used models for the characterization of protein sequences. A key feature of the method is that it is able to disentangle direct interactions from indirect interactions that are mediated via other residues. As such the method greatly improves the prediction of contacting amino acids in the 3-dimensional structure of proteins and is thus expected to be of help in protein structure prediction. In an extended form, the same methodology can be used to infer protein-protein interactions directly from sequence alignments with high accuracy.
SIB 2009 Young Bioinformatician Award was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation
**2009 SIB Best Graduate Paper**
The winner of the 2009 SIB Best Graduate Paper is SIB Member Julien Roux, 25, PhD student for the past two and a half years in the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Group led by Prof. Marc Robinson-Rechavi at the University of Lausanne. The topic of his paper Developmental Constraints on Vertebrate Genome Evolution (PLoS Genetics, December 2008) focused on the impact of developmental processes on evolution.
Mr. Roux looked at how evolutionary changes are limited by the extent they affect the development of an organism, and focused specifically on how the timing of expression in development affects selective pressure on genes. In his own words: "Because embryonic development must proceed correctly for an animal to survive, changes in evolution are constrained according to their effects on development. Changes that disrupt development too dramatically are thus rare in evolution."
While this has been long observed at the morphological level, it has been more difficult to characterise the impact of such constraints on the genome. Mr. Roux studied the effect of gene expression over vertebrate developmental time (from early to late development) in both zebrafish and mice. Results indicate "a strong effect of constraints, which are progressively weaker towards late development, in early development on the genome", which contradicts the "hourglass" model that is generally used to describe vertebrate developmental constraint.
Once published, this paper was immediately recognised as an important contribution to the general understanding of evolution, and was highlighted in Nature Reviews Genetics and Faculty of 1000.
**About the SIB 2009 Young Bioinformatician Award**
The award recognises a graduate student or young researcher who has carried out a research project centered on the in silico analysis of biological sequences, structures and processes. The candidate must not be more than 32 years old at the time of submission and must have worked in Switzerland for at least 6 months in 2008. The SIB 2009 Young Bioinformatician Award carries a cash prize of CHF 10,000, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and an award certificate.
**About the SIB 2009 Best Graduate Paper**
This award recognises a graduate student who has not yet completed his or her PhD, at the time the paper was published. The applicant must have studied in Switzerland for at least 6 months in 2008. SIB 2009 Best Graduate Paper award carries a cash prize of CHF 5,000 and an award certificate.
The submitted papers must have been published or be subject to publication between July 1 2008 – June 30 2009. Applications for the award may be submitted by the candidate or by any SIB group leader or faculty of a Swiss university or federal institute of technology.
About SIB www.isb-sib.ch
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
Email janice.blondeau@isb-sib.ch
Telephone +41 21 692 40 54