Bioinformatics in Africa: Part7 - Tunisia

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