The implementation study project plan of ELIXIR Italy consists of six activities that aim to boost the cooperation with existing ELIXIR activities and are expected to deepen the interaction between ELIXIR-IIB, the Joint Research Unit embodying the Italian Node, and ELIXIR. The partners involved have already established contacts with other ELIXIR Nodes and the relevant ELIXIR Platforms and Services in order to ensure an advantageous outcome for all the involved parties.

This project will increase interoperability between four ELIXIR resources (CATH, SWISS-MODEL, InterPro and PDBe), three of which are Core Resources, by building APIs that facilitate the import and export of data between them.

This study follows on from a number of earlier activities that has established the ELIXIR Beacon Project. 

During 2019-21 the main aims are to:

This implementation study is designed to

This Study will build on recent developments across the RD community by aligning and securely interconnecting existing international infrastructures (RD-Connect, European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA), and tranSMART) with the general ELIXIR infrastructure. Tasks will develop upon services provided by ELIXIR Nodes and international standards such as those from the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH).

This study will build on recent work with  Software containers which, as a key element in the frame of Open Science, Open Data & Open Source, is strongly supported and advocated by ELIXIR. Software containers are transversal to most of the strategic lines of the ELIXIR Tools platform for the 2019 - 2023 Scientific programme.

There will be three Work Packages: 

To raise the quality and sustainability of research software

This study will promote the production, adopting, promoting and measuring information standards and best practices applied to software development life cycle. We have published four simple recommendations to encourage best practices in research software and the Top 10 metrics for life science software good practices. 

The next steps are to:

The collaboration between EMBL-EBI and ELIXIR Czech Republic enabled the development and release of a reusable, web based tool for linking sequence conservation information with biomolecular structural data.

As part of the project, the team at the ELIXIR Czech Republic (Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences, IOCB) pooled their expertise in linking sequence data with structure stability, interactions and functions with EMBL-EBI’s experience in providing sequence similarity search (HMMER service).

Machine Learning (ML) enables computers to assist humans in making sense of large and complex data sets. With the fall in the cost of high-throughput technologies, large amounts of omics data are being generated and made accessible to researchers. Analysing these complex high-volume data is not trivial, and the use of classical statistics cannot explore their full potential.

This project is to improve the coordination between the Beyond 1 Million Genomes project and the Federated Human Data / ELIXIR CONVERGE projects. All three projects are based around Federated EGA, or its technology, to support cross border access to human controlled access genetic and phenotypic data.