More than the sum of its parts. The IFB has a fundamental role in bringing to bear the pooling of the physical, operational, and human resources in order to answer users’ needs in services and support, disseminate technological innovations, tracking the cutting-edge developments in technology and research at national and international level (via ELIXIR), and developing the training required in this very fluid landscape.
The IFB’s modus operandi relies on a shared task force which regroups various experts from the IFB’s platforms, thus boosting the sharing of knowledge and expertise, the design of robust and innovative solutions, and the deployment of services. The value added by this synergistic federation of regional bioinformatics platforms is a critical feature of the IFB infrastructure.
Regional platforms provide services and technical support to scientific projects in their local life sciences community. They also provide training, develop tools for the life sciences community and share part of their IT infrastructure. The regional platforms are integrated into bioinformatics research laboratories and are therefore able to maintain an essential link between service provision and research activities.
IFB-Core platform's mission is to coordinate the use of the means and the activities of the national infrastructure. IFB-core is also the interlocutor of the ELIXIR network, of which IFB is the French node (ELIXIR-FR). The IFB-core serves as an interface with various actors in order to set up and manage a multi-site national computing infrastructure (National Network of Computing Resources, NNCR) aiming at pooling resources and federating the life sciences communities around tools adapted to their needs.
The mission of the ABiMS platform is to assist researchers of the marine and, more broadly of the life sciences communities, in the analysis of their bioinformatic data as well as in the development of software and databases. It is also connected to the EMBRC infrastructure, is part of the IBiSA network via the regional BioGenOuest project, and is ISO 9001: 2015 certified. Through its numerous interactions with research units, ABiMS is involved in several projects with national and European impact, involving bioanalysis activities, software, and infrastructures development.
The Accessible Reproducible and Transparent bioinformatics platform of the Institut de Biologie Paris Seine provides support to biologists and medical doctors for functional genomics and precision medicine. It is implanted on the Jussieu campus of the faculty of sciences of Sorbonne Université and is also strongly involved in clinical research as a partner of the SIRIC Curamus that gathers efforts in cancerology from the 5 university hospitals of SU. ARTbio is running 2 public Galaxy servers, https://mississippi.fr and https://usegalaxy.sorbonne-universite.fr which provide environments for small RNA profiling and variant analyses, respectively. It also provides public servers for R analyses as well as for data storage. A third Galaxy server is dedicated to ARTbio user projects. ARTbio develops open source bioinformatics softwares, most of them available as Galaxy plugin tools (more than 48 tools available in https://github.com/ARTbio/tools-artbio. Beside accompaniments of user projects under contracts, ARTbio is maintaining its own research lines in order to develop top level expertise in three specific domains: small RNA biology and viral small RNAs, statistical and machine learning methods for single cell RNAseq analysis, and predisposition mutations in children and young adult acute myeloid leukemia (partner of the CONECT-AML INCA project). ARTbio has defined training in bioinformatic as a top priority in the incoming years. Thus, in addition to the organisation of regular training sessions, ARTbio is nowadays known for its companionship offer and is also leading the project STARTbio for a University Diploma in Bioinformatics at Sorbonne Université, based on a practical approach of analyses as well as heavy use of e-learning tools (videoconferences and executable tutorials)
The ATGC bioinformatics platform provides services for evolutionary, comparative, and functional genomics. It promotes the methodological developments from the Methods and Algorithms for Bioinformatics (MAB) team at LIRMM. These developments are disseminated to the scientific community as freely accessible services from the platform’s website. Most of the tools can be run directly online, via a dedicated web interface from which each user can load their own data. These interfaces have been designed to facilitate the usage of the tools and the analysis and the interpretation of results.
AuBi is the Clermont bioinformatics platform for life sciences (fundamental biology, microbiology, agronomy, environment, health and epidemiology). AuBi relies on the UCA (Clermont Auvergne university) Mesocentre to promote its computing facilities for data analysis, storage, training in bioinformatics, and web service hosting for research. The platform is committed to serving UCA teams and associated entities(public and private companies. Important skills are developed to support scientific projects in the field of large scale sequence analysis in genomics (assembling, annotation, variant analysis, DNAseq, ...), transcriptomics (RNAseq, ChiPseq, ...),epigenomic variations (BSseq), metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabolomics, molecular dynamics but also statistics and imaging.
The BIGEst platform brings together bioinformatics teams and services from the Strasbourg region: GMGM, IBMC, IBMP, ICube, IGBMC, IPHC and LGM. The platform offers expertise, bioinformatic tools and resources, as well as data mining algorithms focused on evolutionary and functional analyses in various application fields, including biomedical, plant, yeast, and bacterial studies.
Bilille is the Lille bioinformatics platform, which was founded in 2016 under the joint initiatives of the University of Lille, CNRS, Inserm, Institut Pasteur de Lille, CHU Lille, and Inria. It has expertise in bioinformatics, biostatistics and bioanalysis and offers a complete service to Lille research laboratories in biology and health.
BiRD is co-managed by the ITX and the LS2N, and employs six computational biologists. Thanks to the skills of this dedicated and highly qualified staff, BiRD advises, proposes and develops bioinformatic services based on high-throughput sequencing data. BiRD has expertise in large-scale data analysis and it has developed dedicated bioinformatics workflows that standardize the processing of raw data into biological significance. Training based on this expertise is proposed in data analysis and programming languages. The services are supported by a dedicated computing and storage infrastructure which is remotely accessible through several web services open to all scientists, regardless of their host institution.
The CBiB is a bioinformatics core facility that provides access to high-performance computing resources, biological data analysis, and programming expertise. The resources help scientists and private laboratories to answer their research needs in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Proposed are state-of-the-art technologies for working with clinical, translational, and basic science data, from acquisition and storage to analysis and sharing. Resources are secure and standards-compliant. From a few to several tens of thousands of samples, the Bioinformatics Centre provides complete DNA, RNA, metabolomics, proteomics as well as image data analysis and integration services.
The DAC platform develops and makes available software solutions and methodological expertise to meet three important needs for biomedical research: data curation, standardization, annotation, structuration, integration, and visualization (for data managers and software engineers), high-throughput omics data processing, including NGS data such as whole-exome and RNA-seq (for bioinformaticians), and finally, basic and advanced statistical analysis, especially integration of multimodal and high-dimensional data (for biostaticians). The platform thus supports scientific and clinical teams at every step of their research projects: from study design to data management, processing, analysis and interpretation, while considering a wide variety of data acquisition approaches (clinical, imaging, genomics, etc...)
The platform is located in Toulouse, south of France. Its aim is to bring together material and human resources to provide life science research programmes with an access to state-of-the-art know-how and to high-level technologies. Over the years the team has built an expertise in diverse applications of sequence analysis. This has been used in software and pipeline developments as well as in data analysis projects including genome assembly (short/long reads), annotation (coding/non coding), (s)RNA-seq, methyl-seq data and variant analyses, metagenomics (metabarcoding/whole genome), and, more recently, data integration. Supported communities are those of agriculture, food, human health, ecology, and bioinformatics.
Hosted at INRIA-IRISA, the GenOuest facility offers an exhaustive bioinformatics environment with hardware and software infrastructure, public databases, software and workflows, together with the associated support. The technological portfolio relies on several computing resources (cluster, cloud, docker and a galaxy portal) and data management solutions (BioMAJ). Over the years GenOuest has invested in the development of data-centered tools. Further, thanks to the CeSGO project, GenOuest offers a set of collaborative tools to manage projects and scientific data in an optimal way. GenOuest also develops bioinformatics applications as well as training courses, and organises the technological transfer of new tools developed by research teams of the Institute.
IMGT®, the international ImMunoGeneTics information system®, is the international reference in immunogenetics and immunoinformatics, created in 1989 at the University of Montpellier and the CNRS. IMGT® is a high-quality integrated knowledge resource specialized in the immunoglobulins (IG) or antibodies, T cell receptors (TR), major histocompatibility (MH) of human and other vertebrate species, and in the immunoglobulin superfamily (IgSF), MH superfamily (MhSF) and related proteins of the immune system (RPI) of vertebrates and invertebrates.
The platform’s expertise is versatile and encompasses many aspects of high-throughput data in biology and in clinics: management, processing, integration, and statistical and functional analysis. Covered are fundamental, translational, and clinical research, including clinical trials. For all these domains, the platform also develops appropriate methods, implements tools and automated pipelines. These are packaged and released publicly or granted on-line access. Software optimisation for high-performance computing is also part of the platform’s know-how. Finally, it has developed an experience in training biologists, clinicians, and bioinformaticians in all of the above-mentioned fields.
The LABGeM team from the CEA/Genoscope has developed MicroScope, a web-based platform for prokaryotic genome analysis and expert functional annotation. MicroScope combines tools and graphical interfaces to study genomes in a comparative and metabolic context. This platform provides data from thousands of genome projects and from post-genomic experiments thus allowing users to expand their understanding of gene function. Expert annotations are continuously gathered in the MicroScope database and so contribute to the improvement of the quality of microbial genome annotations. MicroScope can be used as a community resource for comparative analysis and annotation of publicly available genomes, but also as a private resource with restricted access rights on genomic data.
The Migale bioinformatics platform is a team of the INRA MaIAGE research unit (Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, from Genome to the Environment). Since 2003, it provides four type of services to the life sciences community: an open infrastructure dedicated to life sciences data analysis (500 Tb, 1000 equivalent CPUs), dissemination of expertise in bioinformatics (the annual “Bioinformatic by practice” training session), design and development of bioinformatics applications (genome browser and databases), and data analysis in genomics, metagenomics and metatranscriptomics.
The Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Hub is the service part of the Computational Biology Department. The Hub team involves 50 biostatistics and bioinformatics experts. Created in 2015, the C3BI includes five research units in Computational Biology, and the Hub of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics. The mission of the center is to develop methodological research in bioinformatics and biostatistics, give international visibility to the Institut Pasteur, offer support to experimental research units, and develop the computational and analysis skills of the campus. The platform activities comprise participation in research and analysis projects, on-site assignments within campus units and platforms, training and teaching sessions open to our partners, and provision of a number of resources to the national and international community. The Hub team and all the Department have a long standing experience in the development of web sites (e.g. NGPhylogeny.fr), intensive and parallel computations using both GPU and Big Mems, health data management.
The main missions of the platform, hosted at URGI, are to contribute to the management, compatible with open science, of patrimonial data produced by INRAE and its partners, and to propose tools and suitable environments for data analysis to researchers. The main activities of the platform are plants data integration in the GnpIS information System, giving access to computing resources and analysis tools, analysis support, and user training.
The PRABI-AMSB (for Analysis and Modelling of Biological Systems) platform proposes bioinformatic services for biologists who need assistance with specific tools or in-depth expertise for more important projects. The expertise available at PRABI-AMSB covers the following areas: expression data (RNA-seq), interaction data (ChIP-seq, Tap-tag/MS, Yeast Two Hybrid screens), metagenomics and metatranscriptomics, comparative genomics and phylogeny, genome assembly and annotation, and systems biology (metabolic, protein interaction and regulatory networks).
RPBS is a platform dedicated to structural bioinformatics. It proposes: the development of structural bioinformatics methods/protocols, service hosting and on-line deployment of services, training and consulting, and calculation hosting through PAAS.
South Green is a bioinformatics platform dedicated to the genomics of tropical and Mediterranean plants and related pathogens. It federates bioinformaticians from different units and institutes of Montpellier (Bioversity, CIRAD, INRAE, and IRD) with a multidisciplinary expertise in data integration, software development, sequencing data analyses, and high-performance computing. South Green ensures the development of novel information systems such as GreenPhyl, SNiPlay, Gigwa, or AgroLD, and offers bioinformatic pipelines through Galaxy and TOGGLe workflow managers. The platform has built a strong expertise in the development of Genome Hubs and integrated information systems, which deployed for several plants and currently being extended to pathogens.
The Bioinformatics and Genomics (BIG) platform of the Sophia Agrobiotech Institute (INRAE - CNRS - Univ. Côte d'Azur) offers expertise in bioinformatics and solutions for processing, integrating, analyzing and visualizing multi-omics data in the field of plant health and protection. BIG has expertise in comparative genomics, transcriptomics and molecular evolution. The tools and resources produced are made available to the scientific community (website, forge and integrative portals) and can address similar questions encountered in other research areas. In addition to methodological developments, the platform offers support and training to biologists in the use of the tools it produces and more broadly in bioinformatics.
The Bio2M platform is one of the research platforms of the CHU Montpellier Hospital. It offers services for high throughput sequencing (NGS) data analysis: - quantitative NGS analyses (RNA-seq, Chip-seq): expression profiles and differential analyses, - qualitative NGS analyses (RNA-seq, Exome) for SNV, indels, splice variants, fusion RNA, transcript reconstruction, non-coding RNA, - NGS services on request for targeted R&D developments, data mining - More recently, we also offer large-scale public access data analysis, as well as data sharing (Web interface) allowing very easy queries for biologists These services are based on open-source tools, most of them developed in the research group. The platform offers on-demand training courses for biologists and bioinformaticians (NGS data analysis and exploitation, initiation to primary analysis of NGS data, differential analysis tools, linux initiation...)
The CBPsmn is the structure that manages all the HPC and HPDA computing resources at the ENS de Lyon.
As regards bioinformatics, these resources are used locally by the RDP, the LBMC, the IGFL, the CIRI, the SFR Biosciences and by other laboratories in the Lyon region.
The CBPsmn team is responsible for operating the shared IT resources and providing training in their use. The researchers in the user laboratories are trained and assisted by the bioinformatics staff assigned to the laboratories with the help of the CBPsmn team.
The CBPsmn servers are hosted in the Datacenter at ENS Lyon (200m2, 65 bays, 1.2MW of electricity). Three types of equipment are available:
- Clusters (Batch - lead. Lois Taulelle): 3 clusters grouping ~30,000 cores spread across ~700 servers and ~10PB of storage.
- Servers accessible in interactive mode (lead. Emmanuel Quemener): ~300 servers spread across 3 training rooms and around ten technical platforms, several hundred TB of storage.
- The meso-psmn-cirrus cloud (member of the IFB-Biosphère cloud federation - lead. Micaël Calvas): ~28 servers for ~5000 cores and 70 TB of shared storage (manila
The I2BC bioinfo platform is attached to the Institute of Integrative Cell Biology (I2BC), a joint research unit (CEA, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay) that brings together more than 600 people dedicated to research on the functioning of the cell at all its organizational scales. The platform aims at valorizing the resources and activities in bioinformatics developed within the unit in the field of comparative analysis of genomes, the study of RNAs and the structural modeling of cellular machineries. It is located at the heart of the 13 technological platforms of the I2BC, which are members of the National Infrastructures in Biology and Health (FRISBI, FBI, France-Genomics), in order to promote the integration and exploitation of data generated by users. It offers support services to facilitate and improve the processing of NGS sequencing, proteomics or biophysics data and organizes bioinformatics training in close collaboration with the IFB.
The MMG-GBIT IFB platform is linked to the Bioinformatics & Genetics research team of Inserm U1251. It benefits from this strong interaction and provides users with the team’s expertise in human genetics, rare diseases, and oncogenetics as well as NGS data analysis. It provides international reference systems to help collect, annotate, filter, and interpret human genetics data in relation to diseases. These tools, databases, registries and observatories have already received millions of worldwide queries. In addition, training is also provided as well as assisting researchers, from design to analysis, in any bioinformatics or tool development projects related to human genetics.
Orphanet is a knowledge base on rare diseases and orphan drugs. It aims to survey and generate data on rare diseases so as to improve the diagnosis, care, and treatment of patients. The Orphanet website provides high-quality information on rare diseases and ensures equal access for researchers to the knowledge base and to the Orphanet Rare Disease Ontology. Orphanet also maintains the Orphanet rare disease nomenclature (ORPHA number) which is essential in enhancing the visibility of rare diseases in health and research information systems, thus acting as an interoperability vector.
The Plateforme Bioinformatique (PB-IBENS) is a facility of the Institut de Biologie de l’ENS (IBENS). It defines, develops and deploys the hardware and software resources that meet the specific bioinformatics needs of researchers. It is responsible for the maintenance and deployment of a computing cluster accessible to all partners of the LABEX Memolife (IBENS, ESPCI, Collège de France).PB-IBENS also maintains and supports web and database servers (Rsat, Genomicus, DiatomicBase, Finsurf) developed by the IBENS teams, some of which are labeled by the European Infrastructure Elixir. It is involved in bioinformatics training at the ENS, organizes seminars every two weeks and participates to external courses. PB-IBENS benefits from the IBENS teams scientific environment in order to direct users towards specialists who can answer their technical questions related to their specific analyses (Single-Cell, RNASeq, Bioimaging, evolution, etc.).
The "Gilles Thomas" Bioinformatics Facility, located at the Centre Léon Bérard (CLB), was initiated in 2009 by Pr. Gilles Thomas to foster the exploitation of massive amounts of sequencing data in cancer genomics. The team is composed of 11 bioinformaticians and biostatisticians working under the scientific supervision of Alain Viari (Inria). It provides a multidisciplinary expertise, from data management to biological interpretation, to support a large spectrum of collaborations from basic research to translational projects and clinical diagnostic activities.
EvryRNA platform is a web server providing various algorithms and bioinformatics tools developed in the laboratory IBISC of UEVE/Genopole, and dedicated to the prediction and the analysis of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). These RNAs are regulators of gene expression control and genome stability. They are involved in different biological processes, and some of them, including microRNAs, are known to be involved in many diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Their study provides insight into how living organisms function, including differentiation and cell proliferation, but also to consider new therapeutic approaches for genetic diseases and cancer.
The MBI platform stands for “Modelling of Biomolecules and their Interactions”. It is essentially a research platform offering services in a framework of scientific collaborative projects. The main activities concern 3D modelling of proteins in interaction with ligands, of proteins, RNA or DNA, as well as the functional annotation of biomolecules. Available tools include molecular dynamic simulation (NAMD) software and very fast rigid docking and shape comparison programs, all which are run on hybrid clusters of CPUs and GPUs. Data science expertise, including in symbolic data mining, machine learning, and complex graph analysis, is also available for bioinformatics and biomedical applications.
The multi-engineering platform was created in 2019 as part of the interdisciplinary project "The Turing Centre for Living Systems" (CENTURI) in Marseille. The engineers of this interdisciplinary platform provide expertise in bioinformatics but also in image analysis, optics, mechatronics, neuroscience, software development and data management to the 21 research institutes affiliated to the CENTURI project. The engineers are involved in collaborative projects where tools, software, methods, databases, and laboratory equipment and techniques are developed. The platform participates in the training and technology transfer of these developments. Within this context, software and bioinformatics pipelines are developed for the analysis of -omics data (bulk-RNAseq, single-cell RNAseq, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabarcoding or proteomics) and made available to the scientific community. By organizing open desks, training sessions and by linking the different laboratories of the CENTURI project, the platform creates a strong spirit of cooperation and facilitates the diffusion of information between the teams and the platform.
The team Systems and Network Biology for Diseases is an interdisciplinary research team dedicated to the development of i) algorithms and tools for the analysis and integration of biological data and ii) of systems biology approaches for the study of human genetic diseases. On the methodological side, the team focuses particularly on unsupervised approaches applied to multi-layer networks and proposes clustering, random walk or embedding approaches. The team also works on the integration of quantitative data (i.e., transcriptomics, proteomics) in networks to identify the modules perturbed in different conditions. Finally, the team proposes multi-omics integration tools based on dimensionality reduction with matrix factorisation.
The PACA Bioinfo services focus on microbial genomics, metagenomics, comparative genomics, and molecular phylogeny. It provides the community with various free access online tools proposed without prior registration. The platform also collaborates with genomic or metagenomic projects for which it constitutes the main bioinformatic support, in particular with teams of the Mediterranean Institute of Microbiology in Marseille. Significant progress has resulted from the genomic analyses of giant viruses, two sponges, and metagenomes from ancient frozen soils (permafrost). The platform also provides generic statistical tools for comparing large datasets of counts (ACD-tools) as encountered in classical or metagenome-based ecological studies.
TAGC is a mixed research & services Inserm units specialised in the development and application of omics approaches to various biological systems. The laboratory includes a sequencing facility (TGML, a member of France Génomique) and a strong team of bioinformaticians who develop and give public access to bioinformatics resources (software tools and databases) in domains ranging from the analysis of single protein and DNA sequences to large-scale analysis and integration of omics data, with a specific focus on genome variations, genetic and epigenetic regulation, and network analysis.
