Moving towards a pan-European infrastructure for bioinformatics

ELIXIR is a pan-European initiative to operate a sustainable infrastructure for managing and safeguarding biological information in Europe. It will secure public access to information about the building blocks of life, including genes, proteins and complex networks. This will support life science research and its translation to medicine and the environment, the bio-industries and society to deliver economic growth. Consistent with the movement towards open access to data and publications, ELIXIR will make important information freely available to researchers across academia and industry.

The MoU was signed by Finland on 8 July by Marja-Liisa Niemi, Counsellor of Education at the Ministry of Education and Culture. Countries signing the Memorandum (including EMBL) will be represented on the Interim Board, which will be the main body for negotiating the final legal and governance structure of ELIXIR.

In Finland, ELIXIR is part of the Biomedinfra consortium – an integrated Finnish effort linking national and EU-level research infrastructures for biobanking (BBMRI), bioinformatics (ELIXIR), and translational research (EATRIS). Biomedinfra partners include the IT Center for Science (CSC), the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) and the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL).

In 2010–2011 the Biomedinfra consortium received funding of €5 million from the Ministry of Education and Culture through the Academy of Finland. CSC, FIMM and THL provided an additional €1.85 million in that same period. Denmark, Spain, Sweden and the UK have all allocated funding for the construction of ELIXIR Nodes, which will form the bulk of the ELIXIR infrastructure.

“Building the European research infrastructure ELIXIR supports the Ministry of Education and Culture’s central objectives to internationalise research environments, and improve the quality of research and innovation,” commented Counsellor Niemi.

“Finland seeks to play a major role in the ELIXIR research infrastructure, ensuring tight integration with biomedical data processing,” commented Tommi Nyrönen of CSC. CSC already plays an important role in the ELIXIR community.

“ELIXIR is a pivotal infrastructure project for medical research – and the life sciences generally – in Finland,” added Professor Olli Kallioniemi, Director of FIMM. “One of the biggest challenges in the future will be exploiting the exponential growth of biological data and information. ELIXIR, CSC and the national Biomedinfra consortium aim to develop the compute infrastructure – and the know-how to use it – throughout Europe so that we can gain the most from the research that has already been done.”

ELIXIR will distribute the management of life science data across several sites hosted by centres of excellence (the ELIXIR Nodes) throughout Europe. These sites will be connected to a central ELIXIR Hub located at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, near Cambridge in the UK.

More information: Tommi Nyrönen, CSC, e-mail: tommi.nyronen(at)csc.fi, tel. +358 50 381 9511.

See also: http://www.csc.fi/english/csc/news/news/biomedinfra

http://www.csc.fi/english/csc/news/news/highcapacitydataconnectionforbiomedicine

http://www.csc.fi/english/csc/news/news/biomedinfra_implemented