New director of NORBIS

16. October, 2020

NORBIS has gotten a new director!

On October 1st, professor Susanna Röblitz took over the position as director of NORBIS. Susanna is a group leader at Computational Biology Unit (CBU) at University of Bergen (UiB). Her research group focuses on the construction, simulation, analysis and optimization of dynamic, mathematical models for biological and biochemical processes on different levels of organization. You can read more about Susanna and her research at CBU and UiB.

We would like to thank our former NORBIS director, professor Inge Jonassen, and we are happy that he will continue to be a part of the NORBIS family as a member of our scientific advisory board (SAB).

NORBIS Covid_19 webinar mini-series

22. May, 2020

To present some of the work done related to the novel disease Covid_19, NORBIS is arranging a webinar mini-series.

First lecture is May 27th at 12.30. The lecturer is Kyrre Lekve from Simula Research Laboratories and topic is “Smittestopp”. Kyrre Lekve is Deputy Managing Director at Simula Research Laboratories and also member of the NORBIS scientific advisory board.

Second lecture will be June 17th at 11:00 by Inge Jonassen, professor at CBU/UiB and director at NORBIS and head of ELIXIR Norway. Topic for this lecture is “ELIXIR – sharing of biological data – and efforts linked with the Covid-19 pandemic”.

Registration for the webinar miniseries can be found HERE.

International exchange report from Xiaokang Zhang

6. April, 2020

With the support of NORBIS, I visited Professor Bernhard Palsson’s group, Systems Biology Research Group, in University of California, San Diego, USA, from September 2019 to February 2020.

The original plan was actually from May to November 2020, but my application of the US visa was pending in the so-called “administrative process” for four months. But this delay took me to UCSD right at the beginning of the new semester. There are good and bad of that: good thing is that there were lots of welcoming activities on campus; bad thing is that accommodation is in short, especially the flights and (temporary) accommodation were almost booked at the last minute because I couldn’t make any travelling plan before I got the Visa, and the long-term accommodation was booked after I arrived there when most of the resources had already been reserved by the freshmen. So advice from me will be: plan ahead and start the paperwork early.

Bear at Jacobs School of Engineering, UCSD. Photo: Xiaokang Zhang

The campus of UCSD is in La Jolla, 20 minutes’ drive to the north of San Diego downtown. Everything in La Jolla is far away from each other. Even though it’s a good opportunity for walking since it’s very sunny almost the whole time (and for Bergen, it’s rainy or cloudy almost the whole time 😉 but walking from my apartment to the campus is 40 minutes, and another 40 minutes to the nearest supermarket. Public transportation is sort of useless. But that’s a common problem for the people who don’t have a car, so carpooling is very popular. So that problem can be naturally solved after you make enough friends.

My main job there is to continue our collaboration which already started one year before I went there. Carrying particular questions in mind, my work started immediately after I arrived. The first problem solved was visualization of our draft reconstruction model. With the help of Zachary A. King, the main developer of Escher (https://escher.github.io/#/), and the others in the Escher group, our ugly and messy metabolic map was replaced with an elegant and informative Escher map. From there, I worked closely with Daniel Zielinski to explore the draft model. Our work was later presented in the conference Winter Q-Bio 2020 (https://w-qbio.org/), and will also be included in the manuscript currently in preparation from dCod project (https://www.uib.no/en/dcod).

Besides the project mentioned above, a paper from our previous work (An Ensemble Feature Selection Framework Integrating Stability, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/BIBM47256.2019.8983310) was accepted as conference proceedings paper in BIBM 2019 which happened to take place in San Diego two months after I went there. Another manuscript was also finished and submitted to BMC Bioinformatics during my stay there, and it was accepted just before I came back to Bergen (RASflow: an RNA-Seq analysis workflow with Snakemake, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-020-3433-x).

NCAA football match UCLA vs. CAL. Photo: Xiaokang Zhang

By attending the group meeting every two weeks and the group’s winter retreat day, I got to learn the many interesting research topics going on in the group and was also shocked by the large publication number shown in the annual summary on the group retreat day.

Overall, it was an excellent research visit with lots of research input and output, and also lots of cool friends, good food, beautiful beaches, sunshine.

Laguna Beach. Photo Xiaokang Zhang

Register now for the “High Performance Computing in Bioinformatics” course

8. January, 2020

Report from the 5th Annual Conference of NORBIS

15. October, 2019

Entrance to the fortress

The 5^th Annual NORBIS Meeting began with a ferry ride across the fjord to Oscarsborg fortress. The boat looked extremely serious as it approached us with the island and fort in the background, reminding us of the history of Oscarsborg! We then were off to a strong start, with Sushma Grellscheid giving us an excellent, memorable talk on cytoplasmic phase separation, before dinner and the first evening poster session.

Left: Sushma Grellscheid, right: poster session

The next morning, Kjetill Sigurd Jakobsen started our day discussing the Earth Biogenome Project before we had our first round of student talks, where we were lucky enough to get a private showing of two Forsker Grand Prix talks from our very own NORBIS contestants; Joseph Diab and Christian Schulz. After the PhD student forum and discussions across lunch, we headed to the lawn in the centre of the fortress to compete against each other in various challenges, where our problem solving and teamwork skills were put to the test!

Winners of the team-building contest

To make up for the afternoon spent in the sun, we had another round of student talks and the final poster session before closing the scientific aspect of the day. At dinner that evening, there were smiles all around as the winners from the afternoon activities and the student poster sessions were announced and the room was introduced to our new student representatives. The food and the discussions were excellent, and many of us found ourselves continuing the evening at the bar.

The final morning concluded our conference extremely well, with Jukka Corander giving an engaging talk on bacterial pathogen evolution before our final round of student talks. Our own Ines Heiland then gave the closing talk of the conference, allowing us to finish on an outstanding note. After a final hearty lunch, we took the ferry back across the fjord and said our goodbyes as the coach took us back into civilization (Oslo).

Written by Chloe Rixon (IEMR, UiO)

All photos by Kari M. Ersland

Report from the NORBIS summer school 2019

21. August, 2019

On top of Fløya mountain. Photo: Joseph Diab

   

Thursday was the last day of lectures, where Ines and Joseph tied the week together by covering systems biology and pathway modelling/analysis as a whole, and we spent our last evening together having pizza and drinks, migrating from Pepe’s pizza to Tromsø’s historical Ølhallen.

 

  

Ines Heiland giving a presentation. Pizza in the sun! Photo: Joseph Diab

 

On the last day, Friday, I think we all had a lot of new information to take in and were feeling inspired to apply the theory that we had learnt during the week. This was especially clear when listening to the presentations which some brave attendees had volunteered to give, showing us what they had put together in the practical sessions during the week.

 

Register now for the “Metabolic pathway analysis” course

9. August, 2019

Register now for “Bioinformatics for functional metagenomics”

28. June, 2019

Want to organise a course or a workshop with support from NORBIS?

24. June, 2019

Do you carry an idea for a course or a workshop within the fields of bioinformatics, biostatistics or systems biology? Want to invite international experts to give lectures at this event? Once again it is time for NORBIS to ask you to propose a course or a workshop to be organised with financial and administrative support from us. We welcome brand new ideas, as well as adaptations of already existing courses and workshops.

Our financial support will cover travel related expenses for invited and internal lecturers as well as participating student members, for both courses and workshops. For courses, we will in addition give a flat sum of 60 000 NOK per course to the responsible department, to compensate time spent preparing and teaching the course. Our administrative support may help during both planning and execution of the course or the workshop, and will ease the process of making a course available across institutions.

Please visit this page to get an overview of the activities that we already offer, and to read our guidelines.

Our members currently have the following topics on their wish list (among many other!):

– proteomics analysis (statistics and bioinformatics)
– basic and advanced statistics on molecular data (in high demand!)
– high dimensional data analysis
– evolutionary genomics
– network biology
– machine learning
– clinical NGS analysis
– open source data

You are of course free to propose other topics within the scope of NORBIS.

We aim for our courses to be organized in a biannual fashion. We therefore encourage organisers of previous NORBIS courses to apply with an updated proposal, and to kindly add a summary of the participation and evaluation from the last round, as well as a note describing any updates and changes.

Please read more and register your proposal here: by  September 9 2019.

Registration now open for our 5th annual conference – September 30 – October 2

20. June, 2019

We are happy to invite you to this year’s annual conference of NORBIS, the national research school in bioinformatics, biostatistics and systems biology. Our fifth conference takes place in beautiful surroundings at Oscarsborg fortress, situated on an island in the Oslo fjord, on September 30 – October 2. Join us there for great talks by international experts and PhD candidates, poster sessions, team building activities and an opportunity to build your network and hang out with a great group of people sharing many of your interests.

The conference is open to everyone. We cover travel and accommodation costs for all PhD students, while master students and post docs can apply for support. We also want to encourage supervisors and other researchers to join our conference, both to facilitate discussion across several levels of experience, to inspire our students, and to increase your own national network.

Read more here and register by August 26th