The Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB-ISCIII;
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas
**Spanish cuisine
**Spanish history
**Spanish culture
...
: ''Instituto Nacional de Bioinformática'') is an academic service institution tasked with the coordination, integration and development of
bioinformatic
Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divi ...
s resources in
Spain
Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...
.
Created in 2003,
the INB is—since 2015—the main node through which the
Carlos III Health Institute
The Carlos III Health Institute (; ISCIII) is a Spanish public health research institute, legally constituted as a public research agency (), a type of quasi-autonomous entity under Spanish law. The ISCIII is integrated in the Department of Scie ...
is connected to
ELIXIR
An elixir is a sweet liquid used for medical purposes, to be taken orally and intended to cure one's illness. When used as a dosage form, pharmaceutical preparation, an elixir contains at least one active ingredient designed to be taken orall ...
, a European-wide infrastructure of
life science
Life, also known as biota, refers to matter that has biological processes, such as signaling and self-sustaining processes. It is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostasis, organisation, metabolism, growth, adaptation, respon ...
data, coordinating the other Spanish institutions partaking in the initiative such as the
Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), the
Centre for Genomic Regulation
The Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG, ''Centre de Regulació Genòmica'' in Catalan) is a biomedical and genomics research centre based in Barcelona. Most of its facilities and laboratories are located in the Barcelona Biomedical Research Par ...
(CRG), the
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Pompeu Fabra University (, ; ) is a public university located in the city of Barcelona, Catalonia in Spain. Established in 1990 by the Autonomous Government of Catalonia and named after Pompeu Fabra, it is known for its competitiveness in resea ...
, the
(IRB) and the Barcelona's
National Supercomputing Center
Since the early 2000s, China has increased its presence in the TOP500 rankings of supercomputers, with systems like Tianhe-1A reaching the top position in 2010 and Sunway TaihuLight leading in 2016.
By 2018, China had the highest number of super ...
.
It consists of 10 distributed nodes, coordinated by a central node, encompassing the scopes of
genomics
Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of molecular biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, ...
,
proteomics
Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins. Proteins are vital macromolecules of all living organisms, with many functions such as the formation of structural fibers of muscle tissue, enzymatic digestion of food, or synthesis and replicatio ...
, functional genomics,
structural biology
Structural biology deals with structural analysis of living material (formed, composed of, and/or maintained and refined by living cells) at every level of organization.
Early structural biologists throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries we ...
, population genomics and genome diversity,
health informatics
Health informatics combines communications, information technology (IT), and health care to enhance patient care and is at the forefront of the medical technological revolution. It can be viewed as a branch of engineering and applied science. ...
, algorithm development and high-performance computing.
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. Their
MareNostrum
MareNostrum (, ) is the main supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, one of thirteen supercomputers in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and one of the seven supercomputers of the ...
supercomputer has been used for testing the potential efficacy of compounds against SARS-CoV-2.
Alfonso Valencia, former president of the International Society for Computational Biology, is the director.
References
External links
INB
Research institutes in Spain
COVID-19 pandemic in Spain
Bioinformatics organizations
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