Between September 2010 and August 2011 U. Petrovič, a member of the project team, has been a visiting professor and researcher at the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research (CCBR)of the University of Toronto. Scientists at the CCBR have performed pioneering research in the field of functional genomics and high-throughput genetics in yeast and U. Petrovič has been involved in projects where these approaches have been developed further.
B.05 Guest lecturer at an institute/university
Slovenian government accepted the “Plan for development of research infrastructure in 2010 – 2020” within ESFRI. According to this plan, project partners form Faculty of Medicine UL in 2011 became the Slovenian national ELIXIR node. D. Rozman was elected by the Government of the Republic Slovenia as the Slovenian representative in ELIXIR Interim Board (IB). The purpose of ELIXIR is to construct and operate a sustainable infrastructure for biological information in Europe to support life science research and its translation to medicine and the environment, the bio-industries and society. Due to new technologies such as next-generation DNA sequencing, data produced in biological experiments is doubling every few months, and this rate and new types of data are constantly increasing. There is an emerging need that data are integrated meaningfully. The collection, curation, storage, archiving, integration and deployment of biomolecular data is an immense challenge that cannot be handled by a single organisation or by one country alone, but requires international coordination. ELIXIR will operate through a core collection center, in addition to dispersed nodes. The key actors of the Slovenian node ELIXIR.si are partners of this project that will be in Slovenia responsible for (a) collection of post-genome data from different resources; (b) construction and integration of bio-computing centers; (c) construction and integration of infrastructure for integration of biological data, software, tools and services; (d) offering services to the research community, including training and standard development.
D.03 Membership in foreign/international boards/committees
Every year in June the members of the project have organized a Slovene symposia on systems biology and bioinformatics applications. The principal organizer is a Center for functional genomics and bio-chips (http://cfgbc.mf.uni-lj.si), of which the founding members are institutions involved in this project. The bulk of organization work is done by MF, while FRI and IJS are always attending the event. The symposia usually atracts over 120 researchers and is the main yearly event of this type in the country.
B.01 Organiser of a scientific meeting
In 2010 a Zois state award for important research contributions was awarded to the PI of the project, Blaž Zupan.
E.01 National awards
We have developed dictyExpress (http://www.biolab.si/dictyexpress), an interactive, web-based exploratory data analytics application that provides access to over 1,000 Dictyostelium gene expression experiments. dictyExpress has changed the way the researchers of this social amoeba access and explore the expression data. The application is very easy to use, well accepted throughout the entire research community and in daily use by the laboratories around the world. Its interactive interface was a pioneering achievement even outside the Dictyostelium community. The application is directly linked from dictybase.org, a central genome resource of Dictyostelium, and listed as the only resource of gene expression information on its gene home pages.
F.06 Development of a new product
COBISS.SI-ID: 7219028