National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS) and the Swedish node in Elixir (the European Infrastructure for Biological Information)

For the period 2021–2024, NBIS plans to continue our activities in providing excellence in bioinformatics support to researchers in Sweden, enabling world-class life science by offering support, infrastructure and advanced training.

The organisational structure allows for changes in support needs over time as new techniques are developed and utilised.

NBIS coordinates bioinformatics support within Sweden and makes bioinformatics easily accessible for life science researchers.NBIS forms the Swedish node in Elixir, contributing with the Human Protein Atlas (now an Elixir Core Data Resource), activities on sensitive data (local/federated EGA), data management, capacity building and advanced training.

Elixir provides access to necessary data and tools, and enables the member countries to join efforts for cost-efficient systems development.NBIS supports both research groups not having their own bioinformatics resources and large established research groups with their own bioinformaticians needing specialised expertise.

As life scientists develop greater competence in bioinformatics, the scope of NBIS will be shifted towards more advanced expertise. Bioinformatics is a rapidly developing field and enters new scientific disciplines.

We foresee increased diversity in projects; expansions in areas like single cell transcriptomics and ancient DNA; formation of a federated EGA landscape including efficient routes to access and analyse large amounts of genomics data; supporting users with data management and FAIRification of data; AI increasingly used in tools, affecting both development and provision of the infrastructure; collaborations with imaging informatics; and much more, as outlined in this application.NBIS will meet this growing demand by actions along the three lines: a) increased support to users, b) increased training activities, c) provision of user friendly tools and databases enabling researchers to perform more bioinformatics analyses on their own.