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New bioinformatics approaches in service of biotechnology

 

Specific challenge: One of the greatest challenge facing the biotechnology community today is to be able to make use of the vast and dynamic influx of ""omics"" data. The synchronised development of bioinformatic concepts and related computational tools for prediction and modelling is a prerequisite to enable the exploitation of this wealth of biological data as a source of new biotechnological applications. These can range from industry and health to the environment and agriculture. Ethical aspects such as those related to confidentiality, sensitive data and data property are relevant to some bioinformatics applications.

Scope: Proposals should develop innovative bioinformatics approaches to close the gap between data availability and the discovery of new biotechnological applications. Proposals should in particular address the needs of SMEs active in the bioinformatics sector and should take into consideration international activities with the objective of fostering global solutions, standards and interoperability. Practical testing for validation of bioinformatics approaches should be considered.

Ethical aspects are to be addressed if relevant to the targeted research. Activities will span between Technology Readiness Levels 3 and 5. Key challenges in this endeavour are:

                     Development and/or integration of application-oriented databases taking into account the physical distribution, semantic heterogeneity, co-existence of different computational models and data and, as a consequence, of different interfaces.

  •             New efficient statistical approaches for increased interpretative and predictive capacity of data, which are taking into account of the molecular complexity of living systems.
  •             Innovative visualization methods, dedicated to an integrative and synthetic representation of large and heterogeneous datasets involving intuitive tools for visualising and examining data.

For this topic, proposals should include an outline of the initial exploitation and business plans, which will be developed further in the proposed project.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU between EUR 6 and 10 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Expected impact:

                    Facilitated access, handing and exploitation of existing databases paving the way for new biotechnological applications.

                    Bridging existing information from various application areas.

                    Accelerated process design and reduced time-to-market enabled by bioinformatics tools such as modelling and prediction.

Type of action: Research & Innovation Actions