Institut Pasteur de Tunis (IPT):
The IPT is a research institution founded in 1883. IPT is under the supervision of the Ministry of Health and is part of the Université El Manar of Tunis (Ministry of high Education). The missions of the institute are: Public Health Laboratory activities (PHL), Research on infectious diseases, and R/D on vaccines. Research programs are mainly oriented towards local health problems such as leishmaniais, viral hepatitis, and scorpion venoms. The group of Bioinformatics and Modelling of the IPT is hosted by the Laboratoire d’Immunopathologie Vaccinologie et Génétique Moléculaire (LIVGM), and exists since the beginning of 2005. Its present research activities include: genome annotation, EST clustering and modelling of the host/parasite response to Leishmania infection. It consists of two senior scientists, two PhD students and one MSc student
Centre de Biotechnology de Sfax (CBS):
Bioinformatics activity started at CBS in 2001 with the settingup of a research and service unit of bioinformatics. This unit currently includes one senior researcher, one engineer and four Phd students. Activities include sequence annotation (service) and three research programs: ab initio prediction of short eukaryote genes, statistical modelling by Bayesian networks approach of signal transduction pathways and statistical analysis of human sequence variation data (haplotype reconstruction and linkage disequilibrium). Activities of the Bioinformatics unit could be found at the website: http://www.cbs.rnrt.tn/ and the research activity report is available under request to Bioinformatics@cbs.rnrt.tn. Although the computing facilities are good, there is still a need for trained human resources to strengthen bioinformatics capacities at CBS, particularly in structural bioinformatics.
Web site and links: http://www.cbs.rnrt.tn