ELIXIR - Flanders Bioinformatics Infrastructure for Sustainable Agriculture and better Health for Society

From 01-01-2017 to 31-12-2019

Description

Biology and medicine are currently undergoing a revolution, mainly due to a flood of experimental data generated by novel technologies. For instance, determination of the first human genome sequence took more than 10 years of work by hundreds of scientists and cost more than 3 billion USD. Today, about 12 years later, a complete human genome sequence can be determined in less than a day and for about 5000 USD, with prices still dropping. Similar revolutions are on-going in other domains of biological data generation.  On the other hand, advances in ICT offer Life Sciences more and more raw computational power for the handling, interpretation, prediction and simulation of such data. This trend is raising the computing tools used today in this field to the next level, making them as strategically important as the wet-lab tools. For example, the ability to do whole cell and tissue simulation in a reasonable timeframe will boost the ability for forward reasoning and hypothesis testing using computer simulations before going to the wet-lab. These new computing capabilities will open up new opportunities and create a paradigm shift within the Life Sciences. 

To cope with this ever-increasing amount of data, the increased computational needs, and to share the data amongst European researchers, the ELIXIR initiative was recently launched. ELIXIR is a European Research Infrastructure, part of the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) initiative. Its goal is to orchestrate the collection, quality control, share-ability and archiving of large amounts of biological data produced by life science experiments and the resources to compute with this data. To this end, ELIXIR is creating an infrastructure that integrates European research and resources, so ensuring a seamless service provision that is easily accessible to all. This infrastructure is a crucial development with immense scientific and industrial impact; open and organised access to these rapidly expanding and critical data sets will facilitate discoveries that benefit the whole of humankind.  ELIXIR is coordinated from the main hub at EMBL-EBI in Hinxton (UK), with national ELIXIR nodes responsible for distributing data resources, services, or tools that integrate with other ELIXIR resources and with other relevant research infrastructures. Each country drafts a plan of which data resources or infrastructure it wants to contribute to ELIXIR given its own expertise and resources. Upon approval by the ELIXIR Board, this plan can be turned into an ELIXIR Consortium Agreement and the resources can be deployed. Belgium recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding to join ELIXIR with the intention of contributing its unique data, tools, and statistical and data mining solutions to the ELIXIR initiative. 

This research proposal aims to build on the strengths of unique Flemish data, compute(r) resources and bioinformatics infrastructure. Funding transcending the current per-project approach is required to integrate the existing infrastructure into the ELIXIR programme whilst further maintain, curate, and deploy these existing unique resources on a much broader scale, with the ultimate goal of becoming an integral part of the ELIXIR infrastructure.

Flanders is at the forefront of life sciences and biotech development, with an impressive number of R&D driven biotech companies that collaborate with academic institutes and research centres, such as VIB and iMinds. For instance, Flanders can boast the largest European R&D cluster in plant biotech with an outstanding level of cooperation between research institutions and multinationals. This excellence has led to leading plant genomics resources and to unique bioinformatics, data mining and biostatistical tools and databases for plant molecular biology with applications in sustainable agriculture. Regarding Health, the clinical genomics community in Flanders, for example, has organised specific infrastructures to handle next-generation sequencing for diagnostic and research purposes. The ensuing large databases of genomic sequence data and clinical diagnostic data are of great value for biomedical research. At the same time, the bioinformatics community in Flanders continues to develop novel statistical and data mining methods to analyse all these data in the best possible ways. Flanders also invested in its capabilities in High Performance and Big Data Computing, such as the Flemish Supercomputer Centre (VSC), a shared resource available to all of the life sciences research that is upgrading its facilities to handle the combination of Big Data Computing and High Performance Computing more efficiently. Flanders also invested in the founding of the ExaScience Life Lab, an expertise centre for high performance and big data computation in Life Sciences, a collaboration between Intel, Janssen Pharmaceutica, Imec and all Flemish universities.

By further development and integration of all of these capabilities, we aim to improve the deployment of Flemish biological resources and services and make them available to ELIXIR to further boost life science research and industry in Europe.

Team

• Yves Moreau, Co-promoter
• Wim Vranken, Co-promoter (External)
• Kris Laukens, Co-promoter (External)
• Dirk Valkenborg, Co-promoter (External)
• Yves Van de Peer, Coordinator (External)

Financing

Funding: Vlaamse overheid - Vlaamse overheid

Program/Grant Type: Other - Other