Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute

The Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB-ISCIII; Spanish: Instituto Nacional de Bioinformática) is an academic service institution tasked with the coordination, integration and development of bioinformatics resources in Spain.[1] Created in 2003,[1] the INB is—since 2015—the main node through which the Carlos III Health Institute is connected to ELIXIR, a European-wide infrastructure of life science data,[2] coordinating the other Spanish institutions partaking in the initiative such as the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) and the Barcelona's National Supercomputing Center.[3]

It consists of 10 distributed nodes, coordinated by a central node, encompassing the scopes of genomics, proteomics, functional genomics, structural biology, population genomics and genome diversity, health informatics, algorithm development and high-performance computing.[4]

It is the Spanish participant in the common data platform promoted by the European Union to ensure a rapid and coordinated response to the health crisis caused by COVID-19.[5] Their MareNostrum supercomputer has been used for testing the potential efficacy of compounds against SARS-CoV-2.[6]

Alfonso Valencia, former president of the International Society for Computational Biology, is the director.[7]

  1. ^ a b Fernández, José M.; Valencia, Alfonso (2012). "Bioinformatic Software Developments in Spain". Bioinformatics in Personalized Medicine: 10th Spanish Symposium, JBI 2010, Torremolinos, Spain, October 27-29, 2010. Revised Selected Papers. Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer. p. 108. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-28062-7. ISBN 978-3-642-28062-7. S2CID 28507895.
  2. ^ "España ya forma parte de Elixir, un proyecto europeo de bioinformática". La Vanguardia. 23 October 2015.
  3. ^ Pascual, Manuel G. (18 November 2015). "España entra en la élite europea de la bioinformática". Cinco Días.
  4. ^ Calvente, Natividad (2014). Organización, políticas e instrumentos de investigación biomédica en España (PDF). Madrid: Escuela Nacional de Sanidad. p. 27.
  5. ^ "España participa en la iniciativa común de datos lanzada por la UE para coordinar la respuesta al Covid-19". Infosalus. 30 April 2020. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
  6. ^ "En el MareNostrum llevamos semanas probando millones de fármacos contra el coronavirus". Sinc. 24 March 2020. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
  7. ^ "Pedro Duque se reúne con los responsables de los principales estudios de pacientes con COVID-19". Lacera. 11 June 2020. Retrieved 3 July 2020.