The Institut Pasteur hosts the AGM of the French Institute of Bioinformatics

On January 25 and 26, the Annual General Meeting of the French Institute of Bioinformatics (IFB) took place at the Institut Pasteur.

IFB is a national infrastructure for bioinformatics services that was set up following the "Infrastructures in Biology and Health" call for proposals under the French "Investing in the Future" program. It serves as an umbrella organization for the main bioinformatics platforms at France's five main public research bodies (the CNRS, INRA, INRIA, the CEA and INSERM), universities, CIRAD, the Institut Curie and the Institut Pasteur – in total around thirty platforms or facilities, which are grouped into six regional centers covering the entire country. The main aim of IFB is to provide basic bioinformatics services for scientists and engineers working in life sciences. IFB is the French node of the ELIXIR European research infrastructure, in which the Institut Pasteur is also involved.

IFB's decision to hold its third AGM at the Institut Pasteur demonstrates its recognition of the major efforts made at the Institut Pasteur in this area over the past two years, especially with the opening of the C3BI in early 2015. Over the two days, nearly 200 participants shared their thoughts and ideas on the main services available in France and Europe, on working methods and cooperation between platforms and with scientists, and on topical issues such as charging for bioinformatics services.

Consult the program of the AGM

Of the 39 proposals submitted to IFB, 16 have been selected.

Five of these involve the C3BI:

• "Enhancing the CRISPRdb database and related services: CRISPR-Cas++" with Edouardo Rocha and Philippe Glaser

• "ARIA for hybrid structure determination on the cloud", involving Michael Nilges

• "NGPhylogenie.fr" with Olivier Gascuel

• "Provide ready to use Galaxy analysis environments for Life Sciences communities", involving the C3BI

• "Microcloud", involving the C3BI