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Work-related information

My main work in the field of protein sequence analysis and more particularily in the development of databases and software tools for this purpose. My first project, as a Ph.D student was the development of PC/Gene, an MS-DOS based software package for the analysis of protein and nucleotide sequences. PC/Gene was commercialized, first by a Swiss company (Genofit) then by Intelligenetics in the US which was later bought by Oxford Molecular.

While working on PC/Gene I started to develop an annotated protein sequence database which became SWISS-PROT. It was first released in July 1986. From 1988 onward it has been a collaborative project with the Data Library group of the EMBL which has now became the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). SWISS-PROT has grown both in size, in its scope and in the amount of work and people necessary to produce it.

In 1988, I started to develop PROSITE, a database of protein families and domains. A little while later I created ENZYME, a nomenclature database on enzymes as well as SeqAnalRef, a sequence analysis bibliographic reference database.

In collaboration with Ron Appel we initiated, in August 1993, the first molecular biology WWW server, ExPASy. What was intended as a prototype grew rapidely into a major site that provides access to the many databases produced partially or completely in Geneva as well as many tools for the analysis of proteins (proteomics).

In the last four years I was involved with colleagues in Geneva and Lausanne in setting-up the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), whose mission is to establish in Switzerland a center of excellence in the field of bioinformatics with an emphasis on research, education, services and the developments of databases and tools. I am currently one of the six group leaders of the SIB.

In November 1997, together with Ron Appel and Denis Hochstrasser we founded GeneBio (Geneva Bioinformatics SA), a company involved in biological knowledge.

In April 2000, the above persons with Keith Rose and Robin Offord founded GeneProt (Geneva Proteomics), a high throughput proteomics company.

If you want more details (including a publication list), you can access my curriculum vitae.

Personal section

I am married to Martine and have three children: Alice (15), Jonas (13) and Colin (9). We live in Vessy, a part of Veyrier, not far away from Geneva.

Miscellanous

If you really are interested, here are some pictures of me that I have retrieved from various places on the Web. The first one was taken in June 1996 in front of the construction site of the EBI building. The second picture was taken during the 24th Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky Conference on BioInformatics and Structure in Jerusalem in November 1996; the third one was also taken during that period but during a social event! Finally, the fourth picture was taken during the 11th ICMCMSC in Washington DC in March 1997

And here is a 5 minutes movie (about 80 Mb) from a TV news interview made just after the creation of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

Last modified 8/January/2002 by AB
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