NRRP intervention area: Mission 4 – Education and Research
Component: 2 - From research to business
Investment: 3.1 - Fund for the creation of an integrated system of research and innovation infrastructures
Duration: The project will end on 4/30/2025
Total project funding: €18,629,476
Proposer: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council)
Cancer prevention through the study and preservation of biological data
Elixir x NextGenerationIT aims to consolidate and strengthen the Italian infrastructure for research in omics and bioinformatics in the context of the European ESFRI ELIXIR infrastructure for Bioinformatics. Omics is based on analysis technologies allowing the production of a very large amount of useful information for the description and interpretation of biological systems, while bioinformatics is dedicated to solving biological problems at the molecular level using computer-based methods. Thanks to these combined disciplines, it is therefore possible to study the inter-individual differences that can lead to tumour formation, thanks to the increasingly detailed characterisation of biological processes (genetic, cellular and biochemical) correlated with the morphological and functional characteristics of an organism. The project is coordinated by the Institute of Biomembranes, Bioenergetics and Molecular Biotechnology of the National Research Centre. The aim is to make available to research and production facilities a BioDataCenter that enables and integrates the production, analysis, management and long-term preservation of biological data, facilitating and stimulating innovation in various fields (among others, biotechnology, precision medicine, pharmaceuticals, agri-food and environmental sectors). Among the main objectives is the development of the technological prerequisites for the establishment of a national service, integrated into the European Genome-Phenome Archive, enabling secure storage, sharing, access and analysis of sensitive human omics data, of great importance for medical research and clinical practice.
Project structure and participation
Consortium Members
- Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council)
- Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
- Università degli Studi di Bari
- Università degli Studi di Milano
- Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca
- Università degli Studi di Napoli
- Università degli Studi di Padova
Project team
University of Bologna team
Scientific coordinator
Prof. Pier Luigi Martelli
Staff hired with project funds
PhD students
- Elisa Bertolini
Departments involved
- Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology - FaBiT
Strengthening and objectives of the Biocomputing Group of the University of Bologna
The University of Bologna participates in ELIXIRxNextGenerationIT through the activities of the Biocomputing Group of the Department of Pharmacy and Biotechnology. Since 1995, Biocomputing has been committed to offering the scientific community freely accessible resources and analysis tools such as databases and web servers. The services, currently offered as part of the European ELIXIR infrastructure, are dedicated to studying the interactions of the various structural and functional aspects of proteins, in particular through the use of machine learning computer tools.
The project will potentially provide these services through the acquisition of computational tools for the storage and analysis of biological data.
In particular, increasingly efficient and precise analyses of the inference of structural and functional characteristics of proteins and nucleic acids will be possible, thanks to the processing of large masses of data and the development of data resources.
Services already released through the project
- MultiFacetedProtDB: a database containing information on human multifunctional proteins
- Alpha&ESMhFolds: a new database developed in collaboration with the National Centre of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (CNAF-INFN) for comparing structural models of 42,942 human proteins, using two powerful tools: AlphaFold2 and ESMFold. Users can compare these models with high-resolution experimental structures available in the Protein Data Bank.
- E-SNPs&GO: an advanced tool using machine learning techniques for predicting the correlation between variations in the human genome and diseases. Researchers will be able to improve their understanding of how genetic differences influence human health, facilitating research into new therapies and diagnoses.
What activities are in progress?
In particular, researchers are working on the following activities:
- provision of guidelines, best practices and data resources that can be used by the scientific community for the objective and impartial evaluation of computational prediction tools
- implementation of a prototype allowing storage and management of - and access to - human genomic and phenotypic data, in compliance with all data protection standards and good practices
- publication of a database containing information on multifunctional proteins (MultiFacetedProtDB, currently being published in the online journal Nucleic Acids Research, Oxford University Press)
- provision of guidelines, best practices and data resources that can be used by the scientific community for the objective and impartial evaluation of inference tools
- implementation of a prototype allowing storage and management of human genomic and phenotypic data, in compliance with all data protection standards and good practices