Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB Gent, Belgium)
Web: www.vib.be

Organisation and Competences: The Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (BSB) research group is part of the Plant Systems Biology (PSB) Department of the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB). The VIB is a top class centre of excellence with more than 1100 researchers and technicians involved in 65 research groups, carrying out research in the frontline of life science. The research groups and established technological VIB core facilities are located at state of the art facilities at the campuses of the 4 Flemish universities. In addition, VIB, with scientists of more than 50 different nationalities, has a strong international research network that attaches great importance to international career experience and attracts on a regular basis group leaders and post-doctoral fellows from different corners of the world.

The PSB is one of the 8 departments of the VIB. PSB has successfully coordinated and participated in a series of EU projects, since the third framework program. It was selected as Host Institute in the Marie Curie Human Capital and Mobility program (FP4) and in the Human Resources and Mobility Program (FP6). Currently PSB is involved in ten FP7 projects and four FP6 projects. In addition, PSB has full access to the VIB core facilities that have expertise and give support for innovative technologies: the "Microarray Facility" (MAF), the "High-throughput compound screening facility" (CSF) located in PSB, the "Bioinformatics training and service facility" (BITS), the "Genetics Service Facility", the "Proteomics expertise centre", the "Nanobody service facility" and the "Protein Service Facility". In the department, there are powerful computer systems at the disposal of BSB such as a computer cluster with >250 nodes, several 64bit machines with 32GB of RAM while homology searches can be run on a dedicated decypher BLAST machine. The BSB division of the PSB Department is a centre of excellence in the field of gene and genome annotation, the field of comparative and evolutionary genomics, and the field of top-down systems biology. BSB is involved in the development of novel gene prediction and modeling tools, making a wide use of machine learning algorithms but also of comparative approaches using sequence information from other genomes. The group is currently involved in many genome annotation projects, mostly of plants, but also Fungi, protists, and animals.

Role: WP4 leader and Task 3.3 leader. Involved in WP1.1, WP1.2 and WP3.2 as a participant.

Staff members' profile:
Prof. Dr. Yves Van de Peer- is Professor in Bioinformatics and Genome Biology at Ghent University and VIB group leader in the Department of Plant Systems Biology. Currently, he is leading the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology division, a group of 35 bioinformaticians with backgrounds in biology, computer science, physics, and mathematics. His research group is a center of excellence in the fields of gene and genome annotation, comparative (evolutionary) genomics, and (top-down) systems biology. He published over
250 papers in peer reviewed journals.
Pierre Rouzé- is an expert in the field of gene prediction and genome annotation. For more than 15 years he has been involved in the development of gene prediction software tools and has been part of many genome sequencing and annotation projects.
Dr. Lieven Sterck- is an expert in genome annotation. As such he has been involved in the genome projects of the brown alga Ectocarpus siliculosus, poplar and Eucalyptus.
Dr. Yao-Cheng Lin- is an expert in gene prediction and genome annotation and in the use of next generation sequencingtechnologies for genome annotation and analysis. He has been involved in several genome annotation projects of fungi that live in close association with trees, such as endo and ectomycorrhizae as well as plant pathogens.