April 2025: The 23rd Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium

The 23rd Israeli Bioinformatics Symposium (IBS2025) took place on April 23 2025 in Reichman University.

IBS is the main annual conference of the Israeli bioinformatics community. Some 350 participants from all universities in Israel attended the conference. The keynote speaker was Prof. Christoph Lippert (the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai, Pottsdam, Germany), who talked about “Deep learning for statistical inference in imaging genetics”. Prof. Zohar Yakhini, of Reichman University, gave the first Benny Chor memorial lecture, dedicated to the late Prof. Benny Chor, Edmond J. Safra member (Computer Science), who sadly passed away some four years ago. Prof. Yakhini talked about “Synthetic DNA - from measurement to cryptographic signatures”. The program included additional talks by bioinformatics faculty members, including a talk by Prof. Ran Gilad-Bachrach, Edmond J. Safra member (Engineering) titled “Explainable learning algorithms for graphs with medical applications“,  and a talk by Prof. Yaron Orenstein, former Edmond J. Safra PhD student fellow, now a faculty member in Bar-Ilan University. Prof. Orenstein talked about “Computational challenges in CRISPR genome editing”. In a sponsored talk, Dr. Shmulik Motola, of Danyel Biotech, a marketing Life Science company, spoke about “Driving the multiomics revolution – the latest innovations from Illumina”.  The program included a lively poster session with presentations of 95 posters.

Prof. Ron Unger, of Bar-Ilan University, was awarded "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the Israeli Bioinformatics Society (ISBCB) for pioneering bioinformatics research and education in Israel.

Two poster prizes, sponsored by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics, were awarded in memory of Gal Eizenkot z”l, bioinformatics undergraduate student at Tel Aviv University, who fell in Iron Swords war.

The awardees were Roni Cohen-Fultheim and Itamar Twersy from Bar-Ilan University for their poster titled “A novel cytoplasmic index for targeting immune-related A-to-I RNA editing in inverted Alu clusters”,

and

Maya Metzger, Edmond J. Safra MSc student fellow (Shamir lab, Computer Science) for her poster titled “BLINCHESS – A novel league-based approach for studying differential abundance in microbiome data”. This is an impressive achievement, considering the fact that the research was performed by Maya during her undergraduate studies, as part of an undergraduate project in the Borenstein Lab, under the supervision of Omri Peleg, Edmond J. Safra PhD student fellow (Computer Science).

The Edmond J. Safra Center supported the conference.

For pictures from the event click here.