EMBRC workshop on e-infrastructure

Dear Colleagues,

The European Marine Biological Resources Centre (www.embrc.eu) is a research infrastructure, now in the preparatory phase, that will provide marine researchers, small and medium enterprises, and industry with access to marine biodiversity, associated metadata, and marine products. EMBRC's services will include access to marine model organisms, biobanks, structural biology facilities, microscopy, and data analysis ('omics) platforms.

A major focus of EMBRC's data analysis platforms will be to enable marine scientists to deal with the flood of 'omics data: sequences, proteomics, metabolomics, and chemioinformatics, that are emerging with new technologies. The EMBRC work package on e-infrastructure is tasked with helping to understand how the EMBRC can aid users in handling these data.

We are writing today on behalf of the EMBRC e-infrastructure work package to invite you to an international workshop on marine bioinformatics and e-infrastructure to be held at EMBL Heidelberg from 28-29 March 2012 at which we will discuss how to design and construct a marine 'omics e-infrastrcuture. The primary goal of the workshop is to compile a “small and well-defined set of potential e-workflow scenarios” that will contribute to a report on e-infrastructures to the EMBRC general assembly. However, we also see this as an opportunity to engage in a broader discussion on bioinformatics and data handling with scientists from many disciplines who face challenges in the collection, storage, and analysis of ever-greater volumes of sequence and other types of molecular data, and we hope you will join us at the workshop. Please also encourage your colleagues others who may be interested to attend and display the poster on appropriate boards.

We have scheduled sessions dealing with data from model organisms, ecosystems, conservation, data integration and accessibility, and to discuss how the various infrastructures and related projects can interact, and we have invited a number of speakers to present work on these topics. The conference website has details of how to register and a preliminary agenda:

http://bit.ly/Ax6Jma

Please note that the workshop will continue as a closed session, for EMBRC members only, on 30 March, when we will draft a report that is a planned deliverable.

Queries should be addressed to Chuck Cook (ccook@ebi.ac.uk) or Peter Lenart (lenarat@embl.de).

Sincerely,

Chuck Cook
EMBL-EBI Hinxton, UK

Peter Lenart
EMBL Heidelberg