BioData.pt is the national infrastructure project that funded the creation of the Portuguese distributed infrastructure for biological data, also named BioData.pt. The infrastructure serves as a national bioinformatics network, and as the Portuguese node of the ESFRI ELIXIR. ELIXIR's vision for the future is to provide researchers in academia and industry with seamless access to biological information that will revolutionise discovery in the life sciences. BioData.pt shares these objectives and aims to catalyse this access and translation at the regional and national level, as well as contributing to ELIXIR efforts at the European level.
In its nature, BioData.pt is transversal to all of the life sciences. It is organised around a general scientific, technical and educational platform, an industry and entrepreneurship program, a distributed service facility and a focus on specialised areas of knowledge and application. The choice of these specialised areas aims to start building this infrastructure capitalising on existing excellence in research and institutions, bridging to international projects, and a potential for translation to the economy.
In Portugal, Bioinformatics is still a young discipline with small numbers of active research groups and companies. A Bioinformatics training program, capitalising on existing experience and the best training practices in ELIXIR will contribute to produce trained professionals in this field.