Transversal Activities in Applied Genomics Unit

The Transversal Activities in Applied Genomics Unit, within Belgium’s Public Health Institute Sciensano, bioinformatics solutions for the diagnosis, surveillance, control and characterisation of potentially harmful organisms; and to promote public health genomics by the effective integration into clinical use and public health policy. Through multidisciplinary research projects and partnerships with in-house and external experts, the unit generates new knowledge and tools and anticipates current and future challenges affecting human and animal health. Kevin Vanneste is responsible for the Bioinformatics Platform at the unit and developed with his team the Galaxy server Galaxy@Sciensano. This Galaxy instance is dedicated towards public health applications, focusing heavily on making available tools, pipelines and databases relevant for using whole genome sequencing for routine pathogen typing and characterization, and outbreak detection. Galaxy@Sciensano is also one of the ELIXIR Belgium Node Services.