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[BC]2 - Basel Computational Biology Centre
The Basel Computational
Biology Centre [BC]2 is a collaborative
effort between academic biomedical and pharmaceutical research institutes
in Basel. The goal of this collaboration is to share knowledge,
resources, and services in an effort to create a center of excellence
in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics.It is hoped
that this effort will serve as a framework to encourage collaborations
and the exchange of ideas at all levels in the scientific community.
Current member institutions are: The Biozentrum
of the University of Basel, the Friedrich Miescher
Institute and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
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Biozentrum Basel |
30 years ago, at a time when biology was still considered a “soft”
science and chemistry and physics were the leading “hard”
sciences it was a courageous and visionary decision to create the
“Biozentrum”
as a center of excellence, devoted exclusively to biology. For the
next 15 years the “Biozentrum” would remain the first
and only such center world-wide. The success of the Biozentrum, gaining
high international visibility in only a few years, attests primarily
to the scientific quality of its research groups. This was helped,
however, by bringing together under one roof apparently unrelated
fields such as chemistry, physics, microbiology, cell biology, biochemistry,
and pharmacology and to create an amalgam of these sciences with biology.
During 2002, the University of Basel and the Swiss
Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) launched a collaborative effort
to establish Bioinformatics
as a new division at the Biozentrum to establish an internationally
competitive research and teaching program in this key area of current
biological sciences.
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FMI - Friedrich Miescher Institute |
The Friedrich
Miescher Institute, named after the discoverer of the nucleic
acids, was founded in Basel on April 10 1970 jointly by Ciba AG
and J.R. Geigy AG. These two companies fused shortly after to form
Ciba-Geigy AG. After the incorporation of Ciba into Novartis, the
FMI achieved an independent status within the Novartis Research
Foundation. The founding charter described the aims of the FMI as
"..to pursue and promote basic research in the fields of biochemistry
and medicine ... and to provide young scientists from all over the
world with an opportunity to participate in scientific research".
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SIB - Swiss Institute
of Bioinformatics |
The Swiss
Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) is an academic non-profit
foundation established in 1998. The SIB's mission is to promote
research, teaching and service activities in the field of bioinformatics
within the framework of national and international collaborations.
Members of the SIB include research groups in Geneva, Lausanne and
Basel. The SIB expertise is widely appreciated and its services
are used worldwide by researchers in cellular and molecular biology.
The SIB maintains databases of international standing (e.g. Swiss-Prot,
Prosite, EPD, Swiss-2Dpage, Hits, Swiss Model Repository). It supplies
and develops services for the biomedical research community worldwide
by way of software and services that can be accessed from the SIB
web servers (e.g. ExPASy,
Melanie, T-COFFEE, PFTOOLS, Swiss-Model).
It supplies services to the Swiss biomedical research community
within the framework of the international network EMBnet.
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