ELIXIR‐EXCELERATE: establishing Europe's data infrastructure for the life science research of the future

A new inter‐governmental research infrastructure, ELIXIR, aims to unify bioinformatics resources and life science data across Europe, thereby facilitating their mining and (re‐)use. Subject Categories: Computational Biology, Methods & Resources, S&S: Ethics

Creating knowledge by connecting and analysing large amounts of life science data is transforming our society, allowing us to start addressing major scientific and societal challenges, such as adaptation to climate change or pathogen outbreaks in an interconnected world. Modern biology is dependent on the generation, sharing and integrated analysis of digital data at scale. A deeper understanding of biological systems is now becoming possible thanks to breakthroughs in technologies that study life systematically at different scales, from molecules and single‐cell pathogens to complex animal or plant models and ecosystems as well as across temporal ranges spanning split‐second reactions to multi‐year clinical or agronomic trials, and beyond. The key to analyse and leverage this complex, fragmented and geographically dispersed life science data landscape is to ensure it is easy to find and reuse by researchers. This article comments on ELIXIR, an international organisation that brings together bioinformatics researchers and life science resources across Europe and integrates them into a single federated infrastructure.