Project members were participating in various high-technology applicative research projects for different industrial partners (Lek- Sandoz, Krka, Bia Separations, Omega etc.). Kristina Gruden was a leader of a work package in Centre of Competence BRIN and actively participated in Centre of Excellence COBIK. The collaboration led to the establishment of platform for improvement of pharmaceutical production strains and procedures. Using it we have identified transcriptional regulator of erythromycin biosynthesis (Kirm et al., 2013 [COBISS.SI-ID 3005775]) and identified markers that predict recombinant cell line stability and productivity. Later finding led to two European Patent applications (European Patent Office, 14192809.3 and 14192810.1; COBISS.SI-ID 3342159 and 3342415).
F.17 Transfer of existing technologies, know-how, methods and procedures into practice
COBISS.SI-ID: 3342159We were actively involved in the popularization of science and have tightly collaborated with different media. In the course of the project we participated in TV and radio interviews and collaborated in preparation of TV shows and other events for science popularization (Plant Fascination day, Night of the Scientists, Science Festival, Science on the street). In the framework of European infrastructure project ISBE we also organized popular science workshop “Systems biology, her influence on science, economy and society” (Ljubljana, October 2014).
F.18 Transfer of new know-how to direct users (seminars, fora, conferences)
COBISS.SI-ID: 30556633Project members are active members of different international professional associations. Kristina Gruden is an Editorial board member of internationally renewed journals “BMC Plant Biology” and “Molecular genetics and genomics” and section editor of “Frontiers in Physiology”. Nada Lavrač is Editorial board member of renowned computer science journal “Data mining and knowledge discovery« and 6 other journals. Blaž Zupan is Editorial board member of »BMC Cancer«, »Current bioinformatics« and »IEEE transactions on information technology in biomedicine«. Kristina Gruden was recently elected as a new member of the Federation of European Biochemical Society (FEBS) fellowship committee. She is also a member of Management Board in FP7 project ISBE (2012- ), an ESFRI based project setting up European infrastructure for Systems biology. Prof. Blejec was elected in2013 elected for President of International Association for Statistics Education.
D.03 Membership in foreign/international boards/committees
The core of the project group, Kristina Gruden, Nada Lavrač and Blaž Zupan are professors at University of Ljubljana, University of Nova Gorica and Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Occasionally they have also been teaching outside Slovenia. They are currently supervising 20 PhD students with whom they are opening new areas of research. Kristina Gruden’s former PhD student received UNESCO-L´OREAL »For Women in Science« fellowship for development of new approaches new data visualization and data analysis approaches in transcriptomics (2011) and her current PhD student Živa Ramšak is pushing the field of plant gene ontologies further and has recently published a high impact paper in Nucleic Acid Research (IF=8.8, A’’).
D.09 Tutoring for postgraduate students
COBISS.SI-ID: 757111Nada Lavrač is Head of the Department of Knowledge Technologies at the Jožef Stefan Institute and leader of the research programme Knowledge Technologies that was/is involved in 28 EU mainly FP6 and FP7 projects, which is, in terms of level of integration into EU projects, the most successful research group in Slovenia. Kristina Gruden is the head of group 'Omics approaches', leading 17 researchers within the Department of Biotechnology and Systems Biology at National Institute of Biology and involved in several national and international projects. Blaž Zupan is the head of Bioinformatics lab at the faculty of Computer Sciences and Informatics (university of Ljubljana) and involved in several national and international projects.
D.01 Chairing over/coordinating (international and national) projects
COBISS.SI-ID: 24434983