http://www.cmbi.ru.nl/

Partner CMBI is part of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre. The Radboud hospital is one of the eight national research hospitals, and it is a reference centre for a wide variety of diseases, which implies that medical facilities around the world send their difficult cases to the Radboud hospital where these problems can be investigated. This is a 'nice' situation for the bioinformaticians of the CMBI because they frequently are challenged with difficult bioinformatics questions that require research in a wide variety of directions. The CMBI consists of five research groups that work on the topics: Systems Biology, Drug Design; Bacterial Genomics; Comparative Genomics; and Protein Structure Bioinformatics. Gert Vriend heads the protein structure bioinformatics group, and he is the director of the CMBI.

http://swift.cmbi.ru.nl/gv/

G Vriend studied biochemistry at the university of Utrecht, The Netherlands and got his PhD in 1983 at the agricultural university of Wageningen, The Netherlands. His PhD project was the study of the assembly process of plant viruses using NMR, EPR, and computational methods. He post-doc-ed in Purdue, Indiana, USA on the X-ray structure of the common cold virus, and in Groningen, The Netherlands where he helped solve several structures by X-ray crystallography, and where he started the WHAT IF project. From 1989-1999 he worked at the EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany, where he continued working on (and with) the WHAT IF program. His main research topics in the EMBL period were protein structure validation and protein engineering. In the summer of 1999 he took up a position at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands where he built-up the Centre for Molecular and Biomolecular Informatics (CMBI). At the CMBI he continued working on fundamental and applied aspects of protein structure (homology modelling, structure quality, visualization, molecular dynamics, ligand interactions) and of information technology (data-mining, information systems, interoperability issues). The move of the CMBI from the science faculty to the Medical Centre of the Radboud University in 2007 allowed him to put greater emphasis on the application of protein structure bioinformatics in biomedical research, thereby broadening the applied aspects of his protein structure research.

Databases http://swift.cmbi.ru.nl/gv/facilities/

Bacterial genomics http://www2.cmbi.ru.nl/groups/bacterial-genomics/research/

Mutations in SMAD3 cause a syndromic form of aortic aneurysms and dissections with early-onset osteoarthritis. IMBH van de Laar, et al. Nature Genetics (2011) 43,2 121-126.

Protein structure analysis of mutations causing inheritable diseases. An e-Science approach with life scientist friendly interfaces. H Venselaar et al BMC Bioinformatics (2010) 11 548-557.

Human Dectin-1 Deficiency and Mucocutaneous Fungal Infections. B Ferwerda et al New England J Medicine (2009) 361,18 1760-1767.

Mutations of ESRRB encoding estrogen-related receptor beta cause autosomal-recessive nonsyndromic hearing impairment DFNB35. RWJ Collin, et al. American J Human Genetics (2008) 82,1 125-138.

PDB improvement starts with data deposition. RP Joosten, G Vriend. Science (2007) 317,5835 195-196.