BGI signs MOU with TTI GG, NLeSC and NBIC for taming flood of genomic data

“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... 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 launched GigaScience, 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... NLeSC is a joint initiative by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO and SURF, which supports and reinforces multidisciplinary and data-intensive research through eScience, 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... 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...”