Basel Computational Biology Conference 2003

[Basel Computational Biology Conference 2003]

About us

[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.

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.

The Basel Computational Biology Centre has been initiated and is coordinated by Dean Flanders (FMI), Roger Jenni (Biozentrum) and Torsten Schwede (Biozentrum and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics).

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