NBIS and Elixir – National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden

National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden, NBIS, is a distributed research infrastructure providing bioinformatics support to Swedish life sciences research. A large part of the operation focuses on bioinformatics support within DNA and RNA sequencing projects, but NBIS also offers support within areas such as proteomics, metabolomics and system biology. The infrastructure provides access to a large number of tools (software, algorithms) and associated user support and training.

NBIS is the Swedish contact point for the European bioinformatics infrastructure Elixir. Elixir is a distributed infrastructure for bioinformatics and biological information, with nodes in 21 countries currently, including leading bioinformatics centres in Europe. The operation is coordinated from a central hub located at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Cambridge. Elixir coordinates and integrates resources that the nodes then make accessible to users in the member countries. Elixir thereby provides services such as biological data, tools for analysing biological data, resources for data storage and calculation, and development of methods and standards for this, as well as associated training.

Sweden contributes to Elixir, for example via the project Human Protein Atlas, which aims to map the human proteome.