The BEN project condemned to death
Circumstances leading to the end of BEN
Currently the Belgian EMBnet Node (BEN) is without official mandate,
without fincancing and without staff. A limited functionality had been
preserved on a voluntary basis till end September 2009 because the BEN
site was, among other things, used for academic courses. This web site
can disappear at any time without warning.
The chain of events leading to this situation is as follows :
- 1 March 2005 - 31 April 2008 : latest contract between BEN and the Belgian
Federal Science Policy Office (Belspo).
A proposal is made to unite BEN with the fellow projects Belgian Biodiversity
Platform (BBPF) and Belgian Coordinated
Collection of Micro-organisms (BCCM) into
a Belgian Biological Resource Centre (BBRC), financed on a permanent basis as
"virtual institute" rather than temporarily as projects.
- Because of uncertainties regarding the future of the Federal Science
Policy itself the negociation of the BBRC project is delayed. The 3
projects receive a provisional extension of their financing till end
2008 (see press release).
- In April 2008 the final version of the BBRC project is submitted to
Belspo. Since the laboratory that hosted BEN is going to be closed on 1
October 2008, new managers and new hosting labs are proposed : Jacques
van Helden (U.L.B., BiGRe),
Frederic Rousseau (V.U.B.-V.I.B., Switch)
and Marc Nyssen (V.U.B.,
BISI). It is proposed to use the resources and expertise of the new
hosting labs to extend the activities of BEN into the domains of
genomics, proteomics, systems biology and structural
biology.
- On 27 March 2009 the BBRC project is discussed and approved in the
cabinet of the Minister of Science. Representatives of BEN are however
not invited. Because of budgettary restrictions the attributed financing
is less than what was asked for and the BEN part is actually completely
cancelled ! ( even if the press release misleadingly still mentions BEN
and a yearly budget of 4.962.000 €, while it 4.400.000 €)
- On 17 September 2009 the vice-rector of the V.U.B. obtains an
interview with the Minister of Science but is told that in the current
budgetary context there is no hope for starting up in the near future a
national bioinformtics initiative in Belgium.
Links to the BEN services
- Public servers :
- MRS : a WWW MRS server with
sequence databanks and other molecular biology databanks
- download : an anonymous ftp server
with software, course materials and Newsletter archives
- Services restricted to registered users :
- wEMBOSS : a WWW interface for the EMBOSS package
- Primer3 : the "native" WWW interface to the Primer3
program
- On-line manuals for software suites available at BEN :
Some interesting links
- EMBnet : The home page of EMBnet
- Entrez : Entrez at the NCBI
- Ensembl : Ensembl at the EBI
- EMBOSS : The EMBOSS distribution site
- wEMBOSS : The wEMBOSS distribution site
- MRS : The MRS "mother" server at Radboud U. CMBI