ELIXIR accelerates with major funding from Horizon 2020
11.05.2015
From September 2015, ‘ELIXIR-EXCELERATE’ will facilitate the integration of Europe’s bioinformatics resources, supporting all sectors of life-science R&D. It will deliver excellence to ELIXIR’s users by fast-tracking the development and deployment of essential data services.
EXCLERATE funding will help ELIXIR coordinate and extend national and international data resources to ensure the delivery of world-leading life-science data services. It will support a pan-European training programme, anchored in national infrastructures, to increase bioinformatics capacity and competency. It will also provide efficiencies in management and operation throughout the infrastructure, which is distributed amongst 17 countries.
ELIXIR Director Niklas Blomberg says,
“I am delighted that the EU is supporting this high-impact project. In the age of big data, it is critical that we can all make the most of the bioinformatics capacity that has been developed in each of our member states. This will make a difference to Europe's 500,000 life-science researchers, who need public research data to be managed well over the long term so it can be reused to maximum effect. EXCELERATE will bring about a step change in how bioinformatics services are coordinated across Europe, ensuring they are integrated, grow in step with the advent of new technologies, and maintained appropriately over the long term.”
Dedicated use cases, defined in close partnership with diverse research communities, will help ELIXIR grow in keeping with the needs of scientists working on rare diseases, biomedical and human genomics, marine and plant sciences and other specialized areas. This will ensure that ELIXIR’s services for data, tools, interoperability, compute, training and industry support are rooted in user needs, and can deliver benefits to existing and future research projects.
About ELIXIR-EXCELERATE:
ELIXIR was invited to apply to a dedicated call within Horizon 2020 following the ESFRI and European Council decision in 2014 to categorize ELIXIR as one of Europe’s three priority new Research Infrastructures. ELIXIR-EXCELERATE represents ELIXIR’s submission to this Call.
Partners include the following organisations, listed alphabetically by country:
Belgium:
Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB)
Czech Republic:
Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry
Masaryk University
CESNET
Denmark:
Danish Technical University (DTU)
University of Copenhagen
Aarhus University
University of Southern Denmark (SDU)
Estonia:
Tartu University
France:
CNRS
INRA
Agricultural Research for Development (CIRAD)
Institute Pasteur
Finland:
CSC-IT Center for Science Ltd
Greece:
Alexander Fleming Institute
FORTH
Athena RIC
Israel:
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Italy:
CNR
The Netherlands:
Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre
Portugal:
Gulbenkian Foundation
INESC ID Lisbon
Instituto de Biologia Experimental e Tecnologica (iBET)
Centre of Marine Sciences (CCMAR)
Spain:
Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO)
Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG)
Centro de Investigacion Principe Felipe
Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona)
University of Malaga
Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
Pompeu Fabra University
Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG)
Fundacio Institut mar d’Investigacions Mediques (IMIM)
Norway:
University of Bergen
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
University of Tromso
University of Oslo
Slovenia:
University of Ljubljana
National institute of Biology
Sweden:
Linköping University
Switzerland:
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
United Kingdom:
University of Oxford
The Genome Analysis Centre
University of Manchester
EMBL:
The European Molecular Biology Laboratory European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
About ELIXIR
ELIXIR, the European life-science infrastructure for biological information, is a unique and unprecedented initiative that consolidates Europe’s national centres, services, and core bioinformatics resources into a single, coordinated infrastructure.
ELIXIR brings together Europe’s major life-science data archives and, for the first time, connects these with national bioinformatics infrastructures throughout ELIXIR’s member states. By coordinating local, national and international resources the ELIXIR infrastructure will meet the data-related needs of Europe’s 500,000 life-scientists. ELIXIR supports users addressing the Grand Challenges in diverse domains ranging from marine research via plants and agriculture to health research and medical sciences.