Germany joins ELIXIR consortium
Germany has become the latest country to join the ELIXIR consortium following ratification by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF).
With its membership, Germany will be able to take part and contribute to ELIXIR’s governance and the BMBF can increase visibility and competitiveness in German research. The ELIXIR Node in Germany will be run by de.NBI, the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure, which was established to co-ordinate bioinformatics service provision across Germany.
Dr Niklas Blomberg, Director of ELIXIR said: “I am thrilled that Germany can now join its national bioinformatics infrastructure with the developments taking place in other European countries through ELIXIR. Germany has a strong and well-known bioinformatics research tradition and through de.NBI it will play an important role in shaping the international standards and research practices that data-intensive life science now needs. I see German membership of ELIXIR as a way of facilitating this and look forward to deepening the collaboration with de.NBI in the coming years.”
de.NBI unites expertise with resources in, for example, microbes, integrative bioinformatics, data management, crop bioinformatics, human genomics and proteomics, and is co-ordinated by Bielefeld University.
Professor Alfred Pühler, co-ordinator of de.NBI, added: “I am delighted that Germany has become a member of ELIXIR. This allows us to build on initial collaboration between de.NBI and ELIXIR in the area of registries and expand it to other areas of interest for Germany such as training, research clouds, proteomics, crop sciences and industrial biotechnology.”
Germany is the fifth country to join the European-wide consortium this year, following Italy, Slovenia, Ireland and Luxembourg.
Last year Elixir was awarded €19 million from the EU’s Horizon 2020 framework programme.
