Ambition and Approach

It is our ambition at NBIC to build and maintain a strong bioinformatics and e-bioscience community that meets the (growing) demand for bioinformatics expertise, infrastructure and personnel in the Dutch life sciences field and provides a stimulating force for advanced research in biology.

Research, Support and Education

To this end, NBIC has created a network of bioinformatics groups located at universities, research institutes and medical centres and in industry. These groups collaborate on cutting-edge bioinformatics research projects in partnership with Dutch top groups active in fields as diverse as biomedical research, plant biology, and industrial fermentation. In addition, technology-oriented collaborations address bioinformatics challenges in topics such as next generation sequencing, proteomics, metabolomics and biobanking. The 'technological' results of these projects are used by the NBIC network to develop novel, broadly applicable tools and technologies that are accessible for and relevant to the international life sciences and computational biology communities. In addition, the NBIC network is establishing support platforms for broader (re)use of tools and databases and is creating an advanced e-bioscience research infrastructure, which will act as an experimental life sciences environment. Finally, NBIC employs a range of education and training activities aimed at current and future generations of bioinformaticians.

Bioinformatics for the community

Open access is essential to progress in (bio)informatics. Ensuring accessibility and usability of newly developed tools and databases is a key objective within NBIC. The NBICommons initiative shapes NBIC's open source policy, which aims to stimulating NBIC groups to bring together their technology under open source license. NBICommons strives to create a limited number of flagship projects, which attract communities of users and developers around new tools. These communities will further develop and improve the (sets of) tools, generate services linked to it and may also explore other (commercial) activities. Open access is the start, but where relevant commercial spin off activities will be stimulated and supported as well.