Bioinformatics
Life sciences have undergone an immense transformation during the recent years. Biology and medicine have become information sciences and new areas of comparative biology have opened.
Bioinformatics is essential by providing tools to efficiently utilise these gold mines of data in order to better understand the roles of proteins and genes as well as patterns and processes of biodiversity and natural ecosystems, and to generate hypotheses for new experiments. Therefore, bioinformatics has become increasingly important, supporting all branches of life sciences, with emphasis on biology and medicine, and also of industrial importance for development of new drugs, nutrition, agriculture, forestry and aquaculture. Bioinformatics has since its infancy utilised computational techniques to detect patterns and make predictions – now called machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Bioinformatics has since long been a concept of success for several of the scientific disciplines of Uppsala University. Strong research environments within biology, medicine, chemistry and pharmacy advances by cutting edge bioinformatics. Uppsala University is also host for several research infrastructures within computing and data driven life science where bioinformatic support is the main activity.
Research areas
Programmes, projects and initiatives
NBIS
Uppsala University is the host of NBIS (National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden) which also forms the SciLifeLab Bioinformatics Platform. NBIS currently has over 100 staff at all large university sites in Sweden. NBIS is also the Swedish node in the European infrastructure for biological information
ELIXIR
ELIXIR unites Europe’s leading life science organisations in managing and safeguarding the increasing volume of data being generated by publicly funded research.
SciLifeLab Data Centre
Uppsala University hosts the SciLifeLab Data Centre, a national resource of unique technologies and expertise available to scientists in areas such as biomedicine, ecology and evolution. SciLifeLab is also an arena for collaborations with industry, health care, public research organizations and international partners.
High-performance computational resources for bioinformatics
- SNIC, The Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing is a national research infrastructure that makes available large-scale high-performance computing resources, storage capacity, and advanced user support, for Swedish research.
- UPPMAX, Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science, is Uppsala University's resource of high-performance computers, large-scale storage and know-how of high-performance computing.