ELIXIR: a distributed infrastructure for life-science information

ELIXIR (http://www.elixir-europe.org/) - the European life-science Infrastructure for Biological Information – is a European Research Infrastructure, part of the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) that consolidates Europe’s national centres, services, and core bioinformatics resources into a single, coordinated infrastructure. 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.  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, ensuring a seamless service provision that is easily accessible to all.  Galaxy is widely used in the ELIXIR community. Therefore ELIXIR has assessed what the needs of it’s members are and how this can be incorporated in ELIXIR’s technical strategy. Galaxy is mainly used through local instances to enable biologists to perform data intensive massive parallel sequencing analyses. The main recommendations were 1) to build a user community within ELIXIR, 2) integration of Galaxy in the ELIXIR platforms, 3) provision of Galaxy training for users, developers and administrators, 4) contribution to the development of the Galaxy platform.  Several initiatives in the national Nodes and the ELIXIR Hub have been initiated, which aim to implement these recommendations.