Recent

The Pregnancy care Integrating Translational Science, everywhere (PRECISE) network (https://precisenetwork.org) was held 3-6 February 2019 in Johannesburg, South Africa. This multinational collaborative research project focuses on placental disorders includes field sites (and biobank facilities) in Mozambique, Kenya, and The Gambia. The Baobab LIMS team in collaboration with the PRECISE network has customized the LIMS for […]

Over the past 14 months, the Christoffels Lab has developed a speaking book that communicates concepts related to biobanks. The book has been designed as a bi-lingual medium with an English-Xhosa, and English-Afrikaans version of the book. These books incorporate informative text, colourful illustrations and bi-lingual audio. The 16 short messages are accompanied by a recorded

TSS seq based core promoter architecture in blood feeding Tsetse fly (Glossina morsitans morsitans) vector of Trypanosomiasis Background Transcription initiation regulation is mediated by sequence-specific interactions between DNA-binding proteins (transcription factors) and cis-elements, where BRE, TATA, INR, DPE and MTE motifs constitute canonical core motifs for basal transcription initiation of genes. Accurate identification of transcription

Kicking off groundbreaking Africa-EU partnership in biomedical sciences: Foundation of a global research infrastructure for biobanking. The University of the Western Cape, Cape Town (South Africa) is hosting the first meeting of the newly launched project “B3Africa – Bridging Biobanking and Biomedical Research across Europe and Africa” on 24-25 August 2015. The rapidly evolving African

On the 20th of August 2015, SANBI hosted a colloquium entitled Store, Query and Analyze @ SANBI (programme here) where six SANBI researchers presented on storing, analysing and presenting data using databases. After an introduction by Peter van Heusden, Hocine Bendou presented on using Django to build a web application to integrate sample data drawn from

Authored by Imogen Wright – Republished from “The Conversation” Health care is entering a new era of personalised medicine, where treatment is tailored to the individual patient. To usher in this era, researchers across the world are trying to create cheaper tests that can find DNA mutations in humans, bacteria and viruses. In South Africa, researchers are using these new,

In another triumph for South African biomedical research, researchers at the South African Medical Research Council’s Bioinformatics Unit, South African Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI), with their international collaborators, have sequenced the tsetse fly genome. The International Glossina Genome Initiative (IGGI), including scientists at SANBI (led by Professor Alan Christoffels) have concluded a ten-year project on the

The introduction of HIV antiretroviral (ARV) therapy programmes in Southern Africa has substantially reduced the burden of infection in HIV-positive individuals. In fact, the 2012 UNAIDS report estimates that as many as 14 million lives have been saved as a result of the rollout of such programmes throughout the world. There is, however, a problem

The first-ever pan-African research programme into disease and DNA was launched last month in Ethiopia, and scientists from the universities of the Western Cape, Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Pretoria, Limpopo, Rhodes and Stellenbosch are playing a starring role. The Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) project will unravel how Africans’ genes deal with illnesses such