Israel is home to very active and highly collaborative bioinformatics, computational biology and systems biology communities, and therefore constitutes a hub of excellent science.
Over the last two decades Israel, with the support of the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), has been involved in several European initiatives to promote these topics. Thus, it is natural that Israel play a role in the emerging initiative of ELIXIR. It meets the national vision that was expanded in recent years for preparing the sustainability of resources and databases toward the goal of “improving the life of individuals and society.”
The Israel Node will work in coordination with the ELIXIR Hub and with the other Nodes in supplying access to biological databases for the active Israeli community. In addition, the Israel Node will contribute to ELIXIR and its large body of European users by focusing on subjects in which Israel is producing biological data that can be used by the ELIXIR community:
- Maintenance, upgrade and integration of bioinformatics tools and databases produced by the Israeli research and biomedical community
- Developing the Israel Node to match the emerging needs of genomics for the disease-oriented bioinformatics and services to the biology and medical community
- Knowledge exchange for analysis of next-generation sequencing and proteomics data analysis
- Updating and sustaining major proteomics databases and servers (e.g., ProtoNet, ConSurf, GeneCards)
- Supporting bioinformatics solutions for storage, retrieval and data trafficking by proposing cost effective solutions