Cyprus has today joined ELIXIR as an Observer country, following the ELIXIR Board’s approval of its application during an extraordinary Board meeting in Barcelona on 2 July.

The ELIXIR Node in Cyprus is currently under development; the Node is envisaged to be comprised of the Agricultural Research Institute, the Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics, and the University of Cyprus.

Observer status in ELIXIR will allow the Cypriot bioinformatics community to collaborate with other ELIXIR Nodes and will facilitate their transition towards full Membership in ELIXIR in future. Cyprus is the second Observer country, besides Greece; twenty other countries and EMBL are full Members, making ELIXIR the largest ESFRI research infrastructure in terms of members.