Infrastructure ELIXIR (European Life-Science Infrastructure for Biological Information) was founded for the purpose of creating and linking distributed research infrastructure for storage, processing and analysis of life sciences data. It responds to the growing needs of the research community which generates a large and exponentially growing amount of data needing to be stored efficiently, to extract key information and access them. Czech Republic became one of the first members of the consortium and is currently involved in a number of activities within the consortium.
Bioinformatics at CTU has its firm position especially in the form Faculty of Biomedical Engineering and activities at other faculties. On FIT is a research about searching compression of DNA sequences using the dictionary methods and approximate searching patterns in genomes (research group Prague Stringology Club). Most recently, Center for conceptual modeling and implementation get involved in those activities and launched cooperation within ELIXIR-CZ to increase interoperability of bioinformatics data – effort, which is very topical for example in The Netherlands, Slovenia and other countries of ELIXIR infrastructure. The advance in this area is primarily in applying ontological methods in combination with software tools.
ELIXIR-CZ awaits in 2016 great development of investigated topics as well as the infrastructure (technology, cooperation, projects, financing). Involvement of CTU and FIT brings significant opportunities for our researchers and students.
Translated and reposted from faculty magazine Buď FIT (fall 2015, page 34)
