The Italian Node is organized as a Joint Research Unit (JRU), coordinated by the National Research Council (CNR), and currently includes 23 partners, among which are several universities, research institutes and public Cloud and High Performance Computing (HPC) providers.

Italian bioinformaticians have led and been involved in several genome projects, for example the grape, apple and peach genome. Today also “research” projects like the ongoing Epigenomics and InterOmics National Flagship Projects have a strong bioinformatics component, which other than research also includes advanced bioinformatics training programs. The JRU already comprises what can be considered to be the leading Italian groups in bioinformatics, but has an open structure with robust review and evaluation procedures to allow and assess applications of additional participants interested to join the Node in the future.

In order to provide support and adequate computational resources for the development and implementation of bioinformatics tools, the Italian Node has four HPC partners among its members. Their contribution, both in terms of infrastructures and experience in managing high performance computing services in various scientific fields (e.g. particle physics) will provide great benefits to all the efforts of the ELIXIR Node.

Our main ambition is to stimulate and assist the development, rationalization and integration of bioinformatics research in Italy, and to transfer the benefits of all these activities to our European partners and in particular to other ELIXIR Nodes, towards the achievement of a pan-european bioinformatics infrastructure able to cope with the present and future challenges posed by life sciences.