At the beginning of March representatives of eleven Czech universities and research institutes met in Prague to formally sign a consortium agreement setting up the Czech bioinformatics infrastructure, ELIXIR CZ.
The signature crowned nearly four years of preparatory discussions and activities of the Czech bioinformatics community. The mission of ELIXIR CZ is to create a sustainable infrastructure for storing, processing and analyzing life science data in the Czech Republic. It will also provide tools and training to facilitate performing these activities. The main motivation for establishing ELIXIR CZ is the fact that life science experiments now generate an immense and exponentially increasing volume of data: it is necessary to store the data, make them accessible, safely manipulate with them and efficiently extract key information.
ELIXIR CZ was successful in the evaluation of Czech research infrastructures conducted by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports. It will be listed on the Czech roadmap for research infrastructures to be approved by the Czech government later this year and starting from 2016 shall be financially supported.
ELIXIR CZ gathers the Czech bioinformatics community and also serves as a Czech node of the pan European bioinformatics infrastructure ELIXIR. The ELIXIR CZ consortium is currently composed of 11 partners, which are coordinated by Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry.
