Include the following sentence in the “Funding” or “Acknowledgement” section of publications:
Project description
The French Institute of Bioinformatics (IFB) is a national research infrastructure that offers bioinformatics services (computing and storage, software development and deployment, knowledge bases, data management, project support), organizes training and participates in methodological innovation in this field of research. It brings together 21 member platforms, 7 contributing platforms and 8 associated teams which cover all areas of bioinformatics and all thematic areas of fundamental biology and its applications (health, environment, agronomy). L’IFB est également le nœud français du réseau européen ELIXIR (ELIXIR-FR). The IFB’s activities are coordinated by the IFB-Core Support and Research Unit (UAR CNRS 3601).
The IFB deploys a decentralized digital infrastructure (National Network of Computational Resources – NNCR) which brings together seven clusters and six clouds totaling 35,000 cores, 20 PB of storage, 270 TB of RAM, and includes more than 800 software tools (packages, appliances, containers) accessible via different user interfaces (SSH, Galaxy, Jupyter, RStudio, Open-on-Demand).
In 2019, following the evaluation of national biology and health infrastructures, the four IFB supervisory authorities (CNRS, INRAE, CEA and Inserm) strongly supported its renewal for 2020-2024.
In 2021, the IFB obtained PIA3/Equipex+ funding of €16.5 million for the Mutualised Digital Spaces for Life Sciences (MuDiS4LS) project, which aims to deploy a shared digital infrastructure across all French regions and to orchestrate biology-health data flows throughout their life cycle. This allocation was supplemented in 2023 by funding of €2 million as part of the PIA4 funding, for the Accelerating Bioinformatics for Biology Applications (ABBA) project. This structural funding has enabled the IFB to respond to several requests from research institutes for the deployment of bioinformatics platforms (ATLASea, SAMS, Biosourced Products, AgroEcoNum, ABRomics) within the framework of several projects of the Priority Research Program and Equipment (PEPR) and the Priority Research Program (PPR) on antimicrobial resistance. The structuring of the digital infrastructure and human resources also enabled the IFB to respond quickly to the Covid-19 crisis by developing the national bioinformatics platform EMERGEN for the genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2. On the international level, the IFB has been involved for several years in open science (ELIXIR-CONVERGE), health (EUCanCan, B1MG, HERA, ISIDORe, EOSC4Cancer, Genome Data Infrastructure) and environment (Agro-SERV).
In 2022, as part of the Research Data Gouv (RDG) plan, the IFB was labeled a Thematic Reference Center (CRT) for biology and health data.
