The IFB is the National Bioinformatics Infrastructure that provides support, deploys services, organizes training and carries out innovative developments for the life sciences communities.
As a national service infrastructure, the IFB’s mission is to offer the life sciences and bioinformatics communities, both academic and private, access to resources critical to their research, support for projects at the highest level of expertise, and the opportunity to participate in ambitious projects at the national and international level. The services provided are grouped into five categories: data, tools, training, support for research projects in biology and the provision of an IT infrastructure dedicated to life sciences. IFB’s active engagement at the cutting edge of developments in bioinformatics ensures the positioning of French research as an essential actor in the field, in particular, in meeting the challenges of integrative bioinformatics.
The IFB federates 36 bioinformatics platforms affiliated to the main French research organizations: 21 member platforms, 7 contributing platforms and 8 associate teams . Thanks to this nationwide coverage, the IFB structures a national bioinformatics community by pooling technical and human resources and disseminating know-how.
The IFB also includes a coordinating platform, IFB-core, located at the Genoscope, which ensures the coordination of the actions of the roadmap, manages the pooling of financial resources, and represents the infrastructure at the national and international levels.
We maintain strong relationships with infrastructures representing the different facets of the French bioinformatics community:
The French Bioinformatics Society was created in 2005 to promote interdisciplinary research in bioinformatics in France; it aims to bring together French-speaking researchers, teachers, engineers and students working on bioinformatics issues for scientific meetings and exchanges in order to maintain an active network. It ensures the continuity of JOBIM, an annual national bioinformatics conference that brings together 300 to 500 people. The SFBI runs a web portal through which recruitment and internships offers, theses, training information in bioinformatics, and calls for relevant national and international scientific events are collated and advertised to the scientific community. A list of laboratories and service platforms active in the field of bioinformatics is also available on the SFBI website.
The Research Consortium (GdR) BIM is a national scientific network that brings together 1200 scientists throughout France and is in charge of developing, promoting and leading bioinformatics research. GdRs are structures created and funded mainly by the CNRS to lead the research in a scientific field chosen for both its scientific and socio-economic importance. The GdR BIM was created in 2006; its network ensures a cross-fertilization and a wide circulation of ideas among its constituent research groups, of which there are currently six: statistics for omics data, biology of symbolic systems, structural bioinformatics, phylogeny, algorithms for sequence analysis, and comparative genomics. The RDA (Research Data Alliance) GdR BIM also offers summer schools on various topics for researchers and doctoral students in bioinformatics and biostatistics.
The association of Young Bioinformaticians of France was founded in 2008 at the initiative of a group of young bioinformaticians from the academic and private sectors.The association constitutes a national structure that brings together young actors working in bioinformatics. JeBif is associated with the Student Council of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB): it constitutes the Regional Student Group (RSG) France and it therefore has an international reach. Beyond the members of the board, a group of motivated young people ensures that the association is active in participating in the development of a dynamic community in the field of bioinformatics.
