Background MAD & IBU

The MicroArray Department (MAD) and the Integrative Bioinformatics Unit (IBU) is an applied biotechnology and bioinformatics expertise centre within the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences (SILS) of the Faculty of Science (FNWI) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA).

Microarray technology development

The unit was set up in 1999 with funding from the Dutch government (ICES-KIS-II WTCW subproject Biotechnology & Bioinformatics) plus major investments from several food and pharma industrial partners. The aim was to establish a proficient microarray facility for life science researchers from both within and outside the UvA. The projected tasks of the facility would encompass the production and use of custom-made microarrays as well as analysis of the results.

Currently:

• Three micro-array technology platforms: oligo-based "in-house spotted array", "Affymetrix GeneChip® system" and Agilent system have been successfully set up, validated and used for several organisms.
• Ten people are working full time at the MAD to successfully implement, execute and expand the microarray technology.
• The MAD performs microarray services for academic and industrial researchers on all microarray technology platforms.
• The Research & Development section of the MAD continuously investigates other platforms and microarray techniques that can be introduced if preferred.

Bioinformatics

Over the past years it has become obvious to the whole life science research community that significant investments in bioinformatics are needed to boost life science research. The MAD & IBU and other research groups within SILS are heavily involved in several major bioinformatics initiatives, both nationally and internationally.

Currently:

• The bioinformatics infrastructure plus tools to pre-process and analyze microarray data have been implemented at the MAD.
• The IBU is extending its bioinformatics research to more advanced software tools that cover the whole microarray data-(pre)process chain from data-storage, via data-extraction and validation, to data-analysis (NBIC Bsik project BioRange).
• Another research focal point is bioinformatics on integration of data from several levels of life sciences research: transcriptomics, genomics and proteomics data (WTCW Bsik project, Virtual Laboratory for e-Science (VL-E)).
• A Centre for e-Sciences is under development at the Amsterdam Science Park. The dual e-BioScience aim of this centre is to develop and implement a highly specialized bioinformatics infrastructure plus software tools and to provide bioinformatics support to scientific biological and biomedical studies.