BioSB conference
BioSB organises an annual scientific conference, the Dutch Bioinformatics and Systems BIology conference. The BioSB conferences discuss the latest developments in bioinformatics, systems and computational biology and interrelated disciplines, and their wide-ranging applications in life sciences & health, agriculture, food & nutrition.
It is a vibrant 2-day conference because of its informality and its excellent mix of established academics, young researchers and industry participants.
The conference is usually organized at congrescentrum De Werelt in Lunteren, although the 2020 and 2021 editions were organized as virtual meetings due to the COVID-19 situation.
History
The Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC) as well as the Netherlands Consortium of Systems Biology (NCSB)/Netherlands Platform for Systems Biology (SB@NL) organized annual meetings for their communities from 2006-2014. The BioSB 2015 conference (May 20-21, 2015, De Werelt in Lunteren) was the first of a series of annual conferences combining both the bioinformatics and the systems biology communities.
The BioSB 2023 conference will be held on 9 and 10 May 2023 in Hotel Zuiderduin in Egmond aan Zee! Click the banner below to go to the conference website where you will find more information about the programme, abstract submission and registration.
The BioSB 2022 conference was held on June 28-29 2022 at Congrescentrum De Werelt in Lunteren, the Netherlands.
Visit the conference website for more information.
The photos from the BioSB 2022 conference are in. It were great days full of inspiration. Thank you all and have fun looking at the photos, made by Bas van Breukelen. Watch the photos here: https://lnkd.in/eSf74GVs
BioSB 2021 – looking back on a successful online edition
We were delighted to meet over three hundred people from both academia and industry during the two-day BioSB 2021 conference on June 15 and 16. Just like last year, BioSB 2021 was held online. The programme included many interesting topics and we again were very pleased to see so many excellent talks and presentations. Read more
The keynote lectures by Kathleen Marchal, Edda Klipp and Sarah Teichmann were highly informative and well appreciated by our audience. The programme also offered 12 parallel sessions including a parallel ELIXIR-NL track and Netherlands Metabolomics Center session as well as over fifty posters. The conference was organized by the Eindhoven University of Technology and Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology together with the BioSB research school.
BioSB Young Investigator Award 2021
Joske Ubels was chosen by the selection committee as the winner of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2021. Joske started her bachelor Biomedical Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam in 2009. In 2011 she attended Lunds Universitet in Lund, Sweden for her minor in Neurobiology. After completing an internship in the Oncogenomics lab of the Cancer Center Amsterdam she became interested in oncology research and started the research master Oncology at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. She first became acquainted with bioinformatics research during an internship at SkylineDx in 2013 and became so passionate about it she decided to pursue a PhD in the topic. Read more
Joske received the award during the award ceremony on June 15th followed by an honorary lecture titled ‘The right drug for every patient: predicting treatment benefit using transcriptomic and genomic data’.
Online, once more …
To serve our conference guests the best way possible, a conference app (NetworkApp) and online meeting place (Gather.town) were set up. The Networkapp was the starting point for all visitors, including all basic details, sponsor information, a place to set up appointments, post vacancies, and announce events. The sponsors were able to use the app as an effective communication channel to reach the conference attendees. Poster sessions were held in Gather.town, offering presenters and attendees an environment that simulated an in-person poster session in order to preserve the personal touch that is so needed in times of virtual meetings. In both apps there was plenty of room for catching up with colleagues and peers, exchanging valuable knowledge and contact details, socializing by playing games and even an “underground” dance floor for the brave.
Organization
The organizing committee built on the experiences of last years’ online conference. The large team of people involved did its utmost to make good use of the technical tools that were at their disposal to organize this two-day event. Based on the positive feedback from participants and sponsors, we are happy and satisfied with the final results.
Sponsors
As always, conferences are not the same without dedicated sponsors. We once more would like to thank our sponsors as well as our organizers for their contributions to our conference!
BioSB 2022
Next year’s edition of the BioSB Conference is scheduled for February 15 & 16 2022 at conference centre De Werelt in Lunteren, The Netherlands. Please mark your calendars and stay tuned via the BioSB newsletter.
We hope to see you all again next year!
BioSB 2020 – first online Bioinformatics & Systems Biology conference
Close to three hundred participants from academia and industry joined us during the two-day BioSB 2020 conference on October 27 and 28. This year’s edition has been different in many ways. Topics covered many aspects of life science research and ranged from microbial evolution to machine learning & AI and precision medicine. Read more
The conference featured exciting keynote lectures from Erik van Nimwegen, Judith Zaugg and Bernhard Palsson, and a full program with 15 parallel sessions and over sixty posters. The conference was organized by the Utrecht Bioinformatics Center together with the BioSB research school.
BioSB Young Investigator Award 2020
Jasmijn Baaijens was selected as the winner of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2020. Jasmijn who is now working at the department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School in Boston, did her PhD in bioinformatics at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the group of Prof. Alexander Schönhuth. Her PhD research focused on algorithm development for reconstruction and analysis of microbial genomes, in particular in the context of viral infections. Read more
Jasmijn received the award during the award ceremony on October 27th followed by an honorary lecture with the title: ‘A reference-free solution to the viral quasispecies assembly problem’.
Results of online interaction
To stimulate interactivity during this online event, we set up both a conference app (NetworkApp) and online meeting place (Gather.town). The latter was also used to organize the online poster sessions. It was great to see so many creative posters (flashes) being set up and the online platforms being used by so many people to catch up and talk to each other. The importance of these contacts are stressed by the first steps that have been set towards a Dutch computational immunology community.
Organization
As this was the first online edition of the BioSB conference, we had to redesign the entire conference setup. Not only the preparation of a full array of technical tools to facilitate the different types of sessions. Thanks to the extensive preparations and large team of people running the conference in the background, the two-day conference ran without any major glitches and has received many positive feedback from participants. Looking back on this, it can definitely be said that the organizing committee can be proud of what has been achieved.
Sponsors
We thank our sponsors for their contributions to our conference!
BioSB 2021
Next year’s edition of BioSB 2021 is planned for June 15 and 16, so please mark your agenda and hope to see you all there again!
BioSB 2019 conference
The BioSB 2019 conference was held on April 2-3, 2019 at congrescentrum De Werelt in Lunteren. The 5th edition of the Netherlands Bioinformatics and Systems Biology conference again attracted an impressive number of researchers and students from universities, UMCs and companies.
Photo impression
Photographer: Bas van Breukelen
Scientific programme
The scientific programme of the conference was intensive, featuring keynote lectures, parallel thematic sessions, poster sessions, a hot topics session, four breakout sessions, and three ELIXIR-NL tracks but it also offered plenty of time for networking. The conference addressed the latest developments in bioinformatics, systems and computational biology, and their wide-ranging applications in life sciences & health, agriculture, food & nutrition.
Keynotes
The keynote speakers addressed: Circuits and devices for robust multicellular control (Mustafa Khammash, ETH Zürich, Switzerland, who gave a nice illustration of the main concepts of this talk using a Lego Mindstorm four-wheel drive), Evolution solutions in translational control (‘Not all proteins are born alike’) (Michal Linial, Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Personalizing treatments using microbiome and clinical data (Eran Segal, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel).
Awards for 3 female scientists
At the conference, the BioSB research school awarded three prizes, this year all to female scientists. Eva Brinkman(SciLifeLab Stockholm) won the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2019.
Nienke Mekkes (a Master’s student (!) from the VU University Amsterdam) received the BioSB Oral Presentation Award 2019 with her presentation about the analysis of chromosomal breakpoints in colorectal cancer.
Jayne Hehir-Kwa (Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology) was awarded the BioSB Poster Award 2019 with her poster on next-generation phenotyping using computer vision algorithms in rare genomic neurodevelopmental disorders.
Social programme
After the conference dinner, the YoungCB organised a Pubquiz followed by the Blazing Harrows band who made the evening a real party. The party evening was followed by a refreshing run through the woods of Lunteren the next morning during the Morning run.
Organisers and sponsors
The conference was co-organised by the BioSB research school and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. ELIXIR-NL, DTL, and the Netherlands Metabolomics Centre were also actively involved in the organisation. The conference was made possible by a number of sponsors:
BioSB 2018: dense and inspiring
The 4th edition of the Netherlands Bioinformatics and Systems Biology conference took place on 15-16 May 2018 in Lunteren. With its programme packed with inspiring keynote lectures and parallel sessions, the conference attracted more than 400 researchers and students from Dutch universities, UMCs, and companies.
- Visit the conference website.
- Read more about the organisers.
Photo impression
Photography: Bas van Breukelen
This year’s scientific programme was very intensive, featuring keynote lectures, parallel thematic sessions, poster sessions, hot topics sessions, breakout sessions, and three ELIXIR-NL tracks. “I think the programme was quite full and I would suggest to at least plan some moving time between the plenary and parallel sessions. However, as reflected in the overall grade, I really liked the conference and the opportunities to meet everybody again!” said one participant.
The conference addressed the latest developments in bioinformatics, systems and computational biology, and their wide-ranging applications in life sciences & health, agriculture, food & nutrition. “A very good meeting, also for molecular biologists that are not trained in bioinformatics like me,” said another participant.
Keynotes
Jason Locasale, Duke University
The keynote speakers addressed modelling as a tool to understand human glucose regulation (Chiara Dalla Man of the University of Padova), the interpretation of human genetic variation across the genome (Martin Kircher of the Berlin Institute of Health), quantitative approaches to understanding metabolism in cancer (Jason Locasale of Duke University), and whole-organism clone-tracing using single-cell sequencing (Alexander van Oudenaarden of the Hubrecht Institute-KNAW, UMCU, and Utrecht University). “The final lecture, by Alexander van Oudenaarden, was a good close-out to the conference: it conveyed the team’s enthusiasm by presenting a surprising method in a way that rarely skipped over oral and visual explanations of unfamiliar concepts along the way.”
Awards
Bram Thijssen, winner of the Young Investigator Award
At the conference, the BioSB research school awarded three prizes. Bram Thijssen (Netherlands Cancer Institute) won the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2018. Bastiaan von Meijenfeldt (Utrecht University) received the BioSB Oral Presentation Award 2018 with his presentation about the robust taxonomic classification of ‘dark’ microbial sequences and bins with CAT and BAT. Joske Ubels (UMC Utrecht) was awarded the BioSB Poster Award 2018 with her poster on predicting treatment benefit in Multiple Myeloma through simulation of alternative treatment effects.
Social programme
After the conference dinner, the YoungCB organised a Pubquiz followed by the Blazing Harrows band who gave a great performance and made the evening a real party. “The conference dinner was very nice and the pub quiz was a lot of fun. The band was a fantastic addition to the program!” The party evening was followed by a refreshing run through the woods of Lunteren the next morning.
Organisers and sponsors
The conference was co-organised by the BioSB research school, the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), and Leiden University (LIACS). ELIXIR-NL, DTL, and the Netherlands Metabolomics Centre were also actively involved in the organisation. The conference was made possible by several sponsors:
Missed it?
If you could not join us this year, you may want to read participants’ tweets (#BioSB18), look at the photo impression, find more information on the conference website, or download the abstract book.
See you next year
Next year’s conference (2019 edition) will again be organised at De Werelt in Lunteren in the Spring of 2019, this time co-organised by the BioSB research school, VU University, and the University of Amsterdam.
BioSB 2017 revisited
The 3rd edition of the Netherlands Bioinformatics and Systems Biology conference was held on April 4-5, 2017 at congrescentrum De Werelt in Lunteren. The conference this year had a record number of participants: over 400 researchers and students from almost every university and UMC in the Netherlands, but also from institutes and companies visited the conference!
This year’s conference was organised by the BioSB research school together with the UMC Groningen and the University of Groningen. Read more about the organisers here.
Photo impression
Photography: Bas van Breukelen
This year’s programme was again highly diverse, featuring keynote lectures, parallel thematic sessions, and poster session, three ELIXIR-NL tracks and an entertaining evening programme with a very nice conference dinner followed by a Pubquiz organised by the YoungCB. The participants discussed the latest developments in bioinformatics, systems and computational biology, and their wide-ranging applications in life sciences & health, agriculture, food & nutrition.
The conference also featured an industry meeting organised by the Bioinformatics Industrial Users Platform.
The conference was preceded by the BioSB PhD retreat on April 3rd, organised by the Young CB. You can find a report about the meeting here.
On April 3rd an international review committee was welcomed to review the activities of the BioSB research school. During the BioSB members meeting on April 5, the review committee reported to the members about their findings and conclusions. The final report of the review committee, will be made available here.
You can read more about the programme of the conference at the conference website.
Some statistics
For the ones interested, this year’s conference was visited by:
- 55 people from companies/industry
- 90 PhD students
- 140 ‘other’ researchers (PIs, postdocs)
- 100 MSc/BSc students
- 16 ‘other’ (organisers, keynote speakers)
Keynote speakers
This year’s conference featured five keynote speakers:
Sten Linnarsson, Karolinska Institute, Sweden
Lecture: An atlas of mouse brain cell types, read more
Boris Kholodenko, UDC Conway Institute, Ireland
Lecture: Getting Insights into Cell Biology by Modelling of Cellular Networks, read more
Ioannis Xenarios, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Switzerland
Lecture: Biocurations for model predictions: example of logical-based models, read more
Jens Nielsen, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
Lecture: Systems Biology of Metabolism: From microbial cell factories to obesity and cancer, read more
Teresa (Terri) Attwood, University of Manchester, UK
Lecture: The Road to Utopia: challenges in linking literature and research data, read more
Awards
Two prizes were awarded at the conference, both sponsored by the BioSB research school:
The BioSB Young Investigator Award 2017
Winner of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2017 is: Ahmed Mahfouz (LUMC). Read more
The BioSB Poster Award 2017
Winner of the BioSB Poster Award 2017 is: Vittorio Tracanna, Wageningen UR, who won with his poster titled “Harnessing the soil microbiome for improved stress tolerance in crop plant”
A thank you to our sponsors!
The conference was made possible by our sponsors:
Organisation
The conference was co-organised by the BioSB research school, the UMC Groningen and the University of Groningen. The BioSB research school aims to offer a vibrant national environment for the scientific development and education of integrative bioinformatics and computational (systems) biology.
Missed it?
If you could not join us this year, you may want to read participants’ tweets (#BioSB17), find more information on the conference website, download the abstracts of the sessions, or read the poster abstracts.
Looking back to a vibrant BioSB 2016
On 19 and 20 April, more than 350 people working in bioinformatics or systems biology gathered in Lunteren for the annual Dutch Bioinformatics & Systems Biology conference.
Photo impression
Photography by: Bas van Breukelen
This year’s programme was highly diverse, featuring keynote lectures, parallel thematic sessions, an evening poster session, three ELIXIR-NL tracks and an entertaining evening programme. The participants discussed the latest developments in bioinformatics, systems and computational biology, and their wide-ranging applications in life sciences & health, agriculture, food & nutrition. The added value of interdisciplinary collaboration clearly emerged from several presentations.
For instance, Daniel Huson shared his experiences in his keynote lecture about the computational analysis of microbiome sequencing data. “It was an eye opener to sit next to somebody who was using my software. It was horrifying”, he said.
Other keynote speakers:
Sander Tans, FOM-Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF), Amsterdam
Stochasticity and homeostasis in cellular metabolism
Mick Watson, Director of ARK-Genomics. The Roslin Institute, R(D)SVS, University of Edinburgh, UK
Bioinformatics, genomics and metagenomics applied to farm animal health
and food security
Jonathan Karr, Institute and Department for Genetics and Genomic Sciences
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York
Toward whole-cell models for science and engineering
Adriano Henney, Executive director of the VHP Institute (Virtual Physiological Human Institute for Integrative Biomedical Research), Leuven, Belgium
Advancing Predictive Medicine
With more than 350 participants, the conference welcomed a record number of participants. Chair of the session ‘Genotype/Phenotype and disease’ Ko Willems Van Dijk (LUMC) says: “The number of participants was impressive this year. Our session was well-visited and very interactive.“
Awards
Three prizes were awarded during the conference:
Sara Pulit (UMC Utrecht) is the winner of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2016
Two poster prizes:
1st prize winner: Erdogan Taskesen (TU Delft)
Poster title: Epigenetic analysis of patients with FTD/MND indicate a role for pathways involved in neurological development and calcium ion binding
2nd prize winner: Amin Allahyar (TU Delft)
Poster title: Disesase specific network with application in network based outcome prediction
“The exceptional quality of the theses and posters that were submitted illustrates that the Dutch bioinformatics and systems biology community is doing very well”, says Chair of the Award Committee Berend Snel.
Sponsors
The conference was made possible by our sponsors:
Organisation
The conference was co-organised by the BioSB research school and Wageningen University & Research Centre. The BioSB research school aims to offer a vibrant national environment for the scientific development and education of integrative bioinformatics and computational (systems) biology.
Missed it?
If you could not join us this year, you may want to read participants’ tweets (#BioSB2016), find more information on the conference website, download the abstracts of the sessions, or read the poster abstracts.
Looking back at BioSB 2015
The BioSB research school together with the Utrecht Bioinformatics Center (UBC) organized the BioSB 2015 conference on May 20-21 at Congrescentrum De Werelt in Lunteren. After the NBIC 2014 conference, this 2015 edition was the second conference co-organised by the BioSB research school. The final date of the BioSB 2016, the next edition of this yearly event, will be announced shortly.
Photography by Bas van Breukelen
Conference context
The BioSB 2015 combined the annual Netherlands Bioinformatics Conference (NBIC) and the annual Systems Biology Symposium (SB@NL). BioSB 2015 discussed the latest developments in bioinformatics, systems and computational biology and interrelated disciplines, and their wide-ranging applications in life sciences & health, agriculture, food & nutrition and industrial biotechnology.
BioSB 2015 conference at a glance
The conference once more proved to be a success with over 320 academic and industrial researchers, programmers and students gathered to get a scientific update on their field of expertise and beyond. Alongside interesting parallel and ‘Birds of a Feather’ sessions, posters, application demos and awards, several fascinating and revealing keynote speeches provided high level insights.
Some facts & figures
- >320 visitors
- 5 keynote lectures
- 42 lectures
- 12 parallel sessions
- 82 posters
Sponsors & co-organisers
We would like to warmly thank our sponsors The Hyve, Genalice, BaseClear, KeyGene and DSM for being the key to the success of the BioSB 2015 conference! Furthermore we would like to express our kind appreciation to the Utrecht Bioinformatics Center (UBC) for their efforts, support and generosity. An overview of the organising and scientific programme committee members can be find at the bottom of this page.
Keynote speakers
Terry Hwa, University of California, San Diego
Resource allocation and bacterial growth: catabolite repression and metabolic overflow
Uwe Bornscheuer, Greifswald Universität, Dept. of Biotechnology & Enzyme Catalysis, Germany and
Henk-Jan Joosten, Bio-Prodict
Protein Engineering using “Small, but Smart” Mutant Librarie
Luis Serrano, Centre for Genomic Regulation, Spain
Systems biology analysis and Synthetic biology engineering of a model organism
Jill Banfield, University of California, Berkeley
Genome-resolved metagenomic analysis of diversity and function in microbial communities
Paul de Bakker, Medical Genetics, UMC Utrecht
Inherited and de novo variation in human genomes
Parallel sessions
The parallel sessions consisted of lectures based on abstract submnission and PI talks by Lodewyk Wessels (Netherlands Cancer Institute), Wigard Kloosterman (UMC Utrecht), Renee de Menezes (VU Medical Center), Richard Scheltema (Utrecht University), Aalt-Jan van Dijk (Wageningen UR), Bas Teusink (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Lude Franke (University Medical Centre Groningen) and Roeland Merks (CWI/UL). Fields that were highlighted during these sessions were:
Metabolism
Gene regulation
Networks & data integration
Next generation sequencing
Bioinf & SysBio in practice: industrial and medical applications (industry track)
Statistics & modeling
Genotype/phenotype & disease
Proteomics
Whole-cell modeling / multi-scale modeling / genome-scale modeling
Metagenomics topical track
NSBM Spring meeting 2015 (biomolecular modeling track)
Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions
The ‘Birds of a Feather’ sessions consisted of session by the Bioinformatics Industrial User Platform (BIUP), the Young Computational Biologists Netherlands, as well as a session about open source tools for large scale genomics data processing and a walk through the woods of Lunteren. During the BoF sessions meetings the conference audience could also follow the ELIXIR-ISBE session on Challenges of Data Stewardship and a Metagenomics topical track.
The PhD retreat preceded the BioSB 2015 on May 19. Renowned scientists gave career talks and all (PhD) students were invited to give a 5 minute flash presentation about their work followed by dinner and fun social activities in the evening.
Awards
The BioSB Young Investigator Award 2015 was won by Mohammed El-Kebir, Department of Computer Science, Center of Computational Molecular Biology, Brown University
Reconstruction of clonal trees and tumor composition from multi-sample sequencing data
The Best Lecture prize was won by Bram van Dijk, Utrecht University
Evolution of differential rates of Horizontal Gene Transfer
The Best Poster prize was won by Saman Amini, University Medical Center Utrecht
Explaining non-responsiveness upon gene deletion
The Best Demo prize was won by Martina Summer-Kutmon, Maastricht University
Curation, Visualization and Analysis of Biological Pathways
BioSB research school
The BioSB research school will offer a well-balanced and high quality course portfolio at post-MSc level (PhD students and postdocs), the annual BioSB conference and other community activities. BioSB will be moulded into an attractive membership organisation for systems biologists and bioinformaticians alike.
BioSB membership
BioSB is pleased to introduce the BioSB Membership to PhD students and academic researchers at universities or non-profit research institutes. The membership entails substantial reduction (academic researchers) or complete remmision (PhD students) of course fees. In 2015 there is a special BioSB membership fee of 150 euro for researchers and 350 euro for PhDs who attended the BioSB 2015 conference. More information can be found on the BioSB Membership page, for questions or more details please contact education@biosb.nl.
Scientific Programme Committee BioSB 2015
- Patrick Kemmeren (chair)
- Bas Teusink
- Bas van Breukelen
- Hans Westerhoff
- Gert Vriend (NSMB)
- Sacha van Hijum (metagenomics)
- Bas Dutilh (metagenomics)
- Barend Mons (ELIXIR/ISBE)
- Vitor Martins dos Santos (ELIXIR/ISBE)
Organising Committee BioSB 2015
- Berend Snel (chair)
- Bas van Breukelen
- Jacintha van Beemen
- Femke Francissen
- Bas Teusink
- Diman van Rossum
- Jeroen de Ridder
- Lodewyk Wessels