Spanish National Institute of Bioinformatics (INB)
The Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (‘Instituto Nacional de Bioinformática’ in Spanish, or short INB) is an institutional platform founded in 2003 by the mayor bioinformatics research groups in Spain with financing from Genome Spain (‘Genoma España’ ). It is now part of the Carlos III Health Institute (‘Instituto de Salud Carlos III‘ or ISCIII) and its overarching mission is to disseminate and provide bioinformatics support to laboratories, research institutions and companies throughout Spain.
The INB serves in the coordination, integration and development of Spanish bioinformatics resources in projects in the areas of genomics, proteomics and translational medicine. It has contributed to the creation of a consistent computational infrastructure in the area of bioinformatics, participated in national and international genome projects, and trained bioinformatics users and developers.
In that sense, the INB is part, -together with other platforms such as ProteoRed (proteomics), CeGen (genomics), BNADN (DNA bank) and BNLC (cell lines bank)-, of the Biomolecular and Bioinformatics Resources Platform (PRB2), which is a big service infrastructure of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), whose main objective is providing a high level technological support to the research community of the national health system. It is funded thanks to the grants for the Platform of Support for Research in Science and Health Technologies call 2013 (reference: PT13/0001/0007), of the Strategic Action in Health 2013-2016 of the National Programme for Research Aimed at the Challenges of Society, within the Framework of the National Plan for Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation 2013-2016, with the funding of the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER).
Nodes
The INB is organized as a distributed institute that currently consists of 19 nodes, including a total of 30+ staff and internationally renowned scientists, plus a central node that directs and coordinates the activities.
The nodes cover complementary areas of expertise, and were selected after an international evaluation of proposals: genomics, proteomics, functional genomics, structural biology, population genomics and genome diversity, biomedical informatics, algorithm development and high performance computing. The computational effort of the INB is localized in the computational node by a special agreement with the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre.