When virology meets glycobiology

What you will learn: how viruses exploit glycans to invade our body, and which bioinformatics resources developed at SIB can be used to explore these interactions

Target audience: immunologists, virologists, glycobiologists – as well as biology and bioinformatics students

Speakers: Frédérique Lisacek, SIB Group Leader, Proteome Informatics Group (University of Geneva) & Philippe Le Mercier, Project Manager, Swiss-Prot Group (see biographies below)

Click to access specific sections of the talk:
1. Role of glycans on vaccine efficiency 00:42
2. Role of glycans on cell invasion by viruses 04:43
3. Bioinformatics resources bridging virology and glycobiology 07:46

Bioinformatics resources under focus in this talk and developed at SIB:

Reference paper

More about the speakers:
Frédérique Lisacek: After completing a PhD in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) from the University Pierre & Marie Curie (France) in 1984, Frédérique held research positions in biology labs in France, Japan and Australia, where she worked on knowledge representation and predictive methods based on sequence analysis. She then successively worked in two biotech companies leading projects on knowledge management and mining in Proteome Systems Ltd in Sydney, Australia (1999-2000) and in Geneva Bioinformatics (GeneBio) S.A, Switzerland (2001-2005). She joined the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in the Proteome Informatics Group in 2006 and has been managing this group since 2008, driving knowledge discovery projects in proteomics and glycomics. Lecturer in bioinformatics at the University of Geneva since 2013, she has been specializing in glycoinformatics for the past ten years.
Philippe Le Mercier: After completing a PhD in Virology at the Pasteur Institute (France) in 1998, Philippe joined the Medical School at the University of Geneva as an assistant professor until 2004 to study the reverse genetics of Sendai virus. He then joined SIB’s Swiss-Prot virus programme, where he specializes in virus genomics & proteomics, databases and graphic representation of knowledge, and where he led the development of ViralZone, a knowledge resource to understand virus diversity.