Austria has joined ELIXIR as an Observer, following approval by the ELIXIR Board on 17 April 2023.
The ELIXIR Node in Austria will now begin to be established. ELIXIR Nodes bring together organisations that provide bioinformatics services, such as universities and research institutes.
The Austrian Node will be initially centred around the bioinformatics services of the University of Vienna, as well as the Medical University of Vienna, with planned expansion to other sites in future. The focus of the Austrian Node will be on services, training, computing, data management and data processing.
Observer status enables the Austrian bioinformatics community to collaborate with other ELIXIR Nodes and facilitates transition towards full ELIXIR Membership, which is expected to occur in the coming years. ELIXIR has 22 other countries and EMBL as full members, and one other Observer, Cyprus.
Thomas Rattei, Professor of In Silico Genomics at the University of Vienna, said “The Austrian bioinformatics community is looking forward to sharing our unique resources, services, tools and experience with the other ELIXIR Nodes. We are happy that we can address current challenges, such as the management and processing of large-scale life science data, now as part of a strong, pan-European infrastructure network.”.
Niklas Blomberg, ELIXIR Director, said: “Austria has a strong bioinformatics community and we are delighted that, by joining as an Observer, this community will be connected to the variety of activities taking place across ELIXIR”.