Hungary has become the 21st Member to join ELIXIR, following the signature of the ELIXIR Consortium Agreement by Dr József Pálinkás, President of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office in Hungary.
The ELIXIR Node in Hungary is currently under development. The ELIXIR Node will be led by the MTA Research Centre for Natural Sciences and coordinated by Professor Laszlo Patthy of the Institute of Enzymology within the Research Centre for Natural Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The focus of the Hungarian Node will be on novel tools, services and databases in the field of protein sequence and structure investigation, DNA sequence analysis and translational medicine.
"Our membership in ELIXIR will help us sustain and safeguard our national investments in life sciences by linking our research community and resources to the ELIXIR infrastructure,” said Professor Laszlo Patthy. In turn, Europe and existing ELIXIR Nodes will benefit from Hungarian expertise and resources in systems and computational biology.
Dr Niklas Blomberg, ELIXIR Director, said: "In just three years since its launch in December 2013, ELIXIR membership has skyrocketed from the six founding members to the current 21. I am delighted to welcome our Hungarian colleagues to ELIXIR and look forward to our collaboration. Hungarian Membership of ELIXIR will open up opportunities for new collaborations and will benefit both the Hungarian as well as European life-science and bioinformatics community.”