eScience Center will enter a collaboration with the Netherlands
Institute of Bioinformatics (NBIC), the Technological Top Institute
of Green Genetics (TTI GG) and the Chinese Beijing Genomics
Institute (BGI). Goal of the alliance will be to foster open access
in genomics and bioinformatics. The group wants to "encourage
collaborative initiatives and community building in the areas of
data management, infrastructure and analysis within their
respective programmes."
BGI gained particular fame last year when it managed to
completely sequence the bacterium causing the "cucumber"
EHEC epidemic. Only last month, the Chinese institute expanded its European operations by opening its
first sequencing center in Denmark. Netherlands eScience Center
itself has gone to great lengths in promoting open access. The
organization's two chairman, Amandus Lundqvist and Jos Engelen, explained their vision in an interview with
ScienceGuide.
Full press statement by BGI
BGI, the world's largest genomics organisation, Technological
Top Institute of Green Genetics (TTI GG), Netherlands eScience
Centre (NLeSC), and Netherlands Institute of Bioinformatics (NBIC)
signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to address the challenge
of managing, transporting, integrating and analysing today's
tremendous flow of genomic data. The collaborating organisations
advocate the adoption and application of Open Source and Open
Access initiatives to genomic data to more easily and rapidly
explore the mysteries of life science.
Genomic data generation is accelerating at an exponential rate,
driven by the rapid development of high-throughput sequencing
technologies, posing new demands and challenges for data handling,
storage and transmission. Under the MOU, researchers from BGI, TTI
GG, NLeSC and NBIC have agreed to encourage collaborative
initiatives and community building in the areas of data management,
infrastructure and analysis within their respective programmes.
Such collaboration will encourage the development and sharing of
services, infrastructure and facilities with the goal of enabling
more sustainable and effective access and understanding of genomic
data.
BGI has conducted considerable research to tackle the flood of
genomic data. In late 2011, it developed a BGI-BOX cloud computing
terminal server for users lacking a bioinformatics background to
access genomic data and bioinformatics analyses in their own
laboratories. In addition, BGI and open-access publisher BioMed
Central launchedGigaScience,a new combined database and journal
focused on the publication and hosting of large-scale data. The
journal makes it possible for the release of large data sets more
rapidly to the wider research community.
"Genomics revolutionized the life sciences," said Professor Jian
Wang, president of BGI, "but the growing flood of genomic data
poses an enormous challenge to optimizing and sustaining the
benefit of high-throughput sequencing technologies. BGI has made
significant efforts to tackle this challenge to advancing life
science research, and this cooperative agreement should provide an
example for researchers worldwide on the importance and value of
shared, sustainable data management and data manipulation in
biological and medical studies."
The signing of MOU provides an opportunity for scientists from
China and Netherlands to achieve powerful cooperation for better
taming tremendous data. Dr. Bernard de Geus, director of TTI GG,
said in brief, "Big data: Big expectation, big challenge, big
opportunity." TTI GG has been established jointly by Dutch
companies in the area of plant breeding and propagation,
universities and knowledge institutions with the mission being to
promote research and education and to create continuity in Dutch
knowledge and education base.
NLeSC is a joint initiative by the Netherlands Organization for
Scientific Research NWO and SURF, which supports and reinforces
multidisciplinary and data-intensive research througheScience, the
creative and innovative use of ICT and e-infrastructures in all its
manifestations with the aim to change scientific practice by
enabling large-scale "Big Data" analysis across multiple
disciplines. Professor dr. Jacob de Vlieg, director of NLeSC, said,
"This is a very exciting initiative to link minds and eScience
concepts between scientists from BGI and the Netherlands, and to
promote 'Big Data' driven scientific discoveries in the fields of
genomics and bioinformatics."
NBIC, the national networked organization of bioinformatics,
pursues innovation in life sciences R&D through seamless
integration of life science data, information and models in the
quantitative analysis of biological systems. Dr. Barend Mons,
Scientific director of NBIC, stated, "As soon as one measures
anything in the 'Omics' era, one needs computers even to manage the
data. For understanding them and turning them into knowledge,
computational methods are indispensable and traditional methods of
information sharing are hopelessly out of date. We should work
together to face this challenge."