ELIXIR Norway is coordinated by the University of Bergen and includes activities at the University of Oslo, UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences at Ås.
The Research Council of Norway supports the Node primarily through its programme for research infrastructure. The Node builds on a national bioinformatics technology platform collaboration, which started in 2003. Partners of the Node continue the operation of a national technology platform by offering consultancy and services on a broad basis, including systems biology. The Norwegian Node offers ELIXIR services within the thematic areas of marine genomics and human medicine, as well as e-infrastructure deliverables, including standards development and support.
The Node is developing and offering NeLS, the Norwegian e-infrastructure for Life Sciences. This is tightly coupled with, and benefits from, generic e-infrastructures in Norway. NeLS consists of several integrated packages geared towards genome-scale analyses and data management, including Galaxy web servers. NeLS also integrates with secure storage solutions, enabling handling of sensitive data e.g. human re-sequencing data. Thus, the infrastructure provides subsystems and underpinnings for analysis of high-throughput sequencing data.
Data provision to ELIXIR Europe is centred within the marine life sciences. LiceBase, the sea lice database, contains relevant and available genomes with accompanying annotation and experimental data. The Marine Metagenomics Portal, with META-pipe, a pipeline for taxonomic classification and functional assignment of marine metagenomics samples and the underlying MAR reference databases. Provision of other marine resources, such as Salmobase, a database for salmonid genomics, are also planned.
The Node also delivers "The Genomic HyperBrowser", a web-based framework designed to be able to support any kind of statistical analysis for any kind of genomic track (or annotation) dataset. Applications include investigations of gene regulation, disease association or epigenetic modifications of the genome. A recent expansion, called GSuite HyperBrowser, makes powerful use of user-specified suites, or collections, of related datasets and empowers researchers to ask questions about their genomic tracks in relation to the vast amount of datasets for different cell types/tissues or different epigenomic marks that has been made available from international projects like ENCODE or Roadmap Epigenomics.
Standards infrastructure will be delivered initially through BioXSD and the GTrack ecosystem. This implies collaborative work with other Nodes, and deliverables will include libraries and tools for converting between the various formats, lowering the barrier for adopting the standard and increasing the ability to exchange data between tools and databases.
