The OLISSIPO Lecture: “Bioinformatics Infrastructure in Bielefeld and in Germany” by Jens Stoye (Bielefeld University) will be held online on April 22, 2024.

Location: ZOOM (here)

Abstract: The German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI) has been set up in 2015 as a distributed infrastructure, coordinated at Bielefeld University. In addition, it forms the German node of the European Life Science Infrastructure for Biological Information (ELIXIR). Initially based on temporary project funding, since 2022 the project receives permanent support via Forschungszentrum Jülich, a member of the Helmholtz Association of national research centers in Germany. The de.NBI network provides comprehensive bioinformatics tools and services, bioinformatics training through a broad range of workshops and courses, cloud computing resources for academia in Germany and transfer of expertise between academia and industry. It consists of 24 partners, including the “de.NBI Resource Center for Microbial Genome Research in Biotechnology and Medicine at Bielefeld University” (MicroGenUniBi). MicroGenUniBi ensures the operation of the de.NBI cloud site at Bielefeld University which involves the installation and maintenance of hardware components, the configuration of software and the (re-)certification of the cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, MicroGenUniBi provides services in microbial bioinformatics and offers training courses introducing to the usage of these services on a regular basis. Currently, provided services cover the areas of pangenomics, metagenomics, metaproteomics and multiomics, classical bioinformatics software solutions, e.g. for alignment, comparative genomics and RNA structure prediction, and the web-based software “BIIGLE” for collaborative bioimage and video annotation. MicroGenUniBi works in close collaboration with the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and the initiative for the establishment of centralized research data competence centers, in particular for cloud technologies.

Biosketch: Jens Stoye received the PhD degree (1997) in Bioinformatics from Bielefeld University, Germany. After postdoctoral positions at the University of California at Davis (1997-1998) and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg (1998-2001), he became head of the Algorithmic Bioinformatics group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin (2001-2002). Stoye has been a full professor for Genome Informatics back at Bielefeld University since 2002. His research interests are in algorithms for bioinformatics, genome-scale sequence analysis, metagenomics and comparative genomics. In 2017, he also became a member of the board of directors of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (ZiF), Bielefeld University’s Institute for Advanced Study. Since 2023 he has been ZiF’s Executive Director.