This award provides support for travel to the Livestock Genomics meeting and associated workshops at Hinxton, UK. The workshop will focus on developing a strategic plan for "omics" data sharing and innovative analysis using trans-Atlantic cyber infrastructure (CI) collaborations and also provide training of young investigators on the latest bioinformatics and CI tools. An additional novel aspect of this proposal is to bring together researchers from a number of non-model species communities, to discuss sustainable cyber infrastructure development. Technological breakthroughs have commoditized and democratized production of "omics" datasets (such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics). Analyses of these large datasets are helping in enhancing our understanding of basic biological mechanisms, species evolution, and a full range of other related topics. US and EU researchers are playing the major role in developing these resources and it will be useful to explore mechanisms for improved data sharing. The meeting at Hinxton, UK will focus on the issues related to sharing and analysis of large datasets by fostering collaborations between major cyber infrastructure initiatives in biological sciences from US (iPlant) and EU,(EBI, ELIXIR and allbio). The working group meeting will develop guidelines and explore CI connectivity specifically for data sharing in animals. These activities can be considered synergistic as they are applicable to other US-EU biotechnology working groups dealing with plants, microbes, insects, and marine species. The US-EU ABWG members will help develop a strategic plan whereas the training component of CI and bioinformatics tools will help develop computational strengths among graduate students, post docs, and young investigators especially those from minorities and women. To extend the outcomes and discussion from the meeting, travel support recipients will present a plan for dissemination following the meeting. The invitees include both established and emerging leaders in animal genomics that are both scientifically and culturally diverse. A significant portion of the award funds will be used to support travel for meritorious graduate students and post-docs. Participation in the workshop will help expand diversity and encourage young scientists to stay in science careers and begin to integrate cyber infrastructure, data sharing and bioinformatic paradigms into biology laboratories.
This Conference grant was to support a workshop on International Cyber Infrastructure for animal data held on September 12 and 13th 2012 in Hinxton, UK at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). This workshop was organized by the Animal Biotechnology Working Group of the US-EU Biotechnology Task Force. The Workshop was jointly funded by USDA-ARS, USDA-NIFA, and NSF by providing travel support for the delegation from the US; similarly the EU funded its researchers to attend this meeting. Cyberinfrastructure (CI) was the focus of this Workshop. The first day of the iPlant Collaborative workshop included hands-on training for a group of approximately 35 scientists and provided an introduction and opportunity to try the iPlant CI and tools. Exposure to, and use of, these tools focused attention on what is available now, what is needed in the future and what the priorities should be. The key outcome of this Workshop is the understanding by the animal research community the need of haedware, software, people, data, data sharing, and various other resource needs. A number of outcomes and follow up activities that emerged from this workshop were: 1) Action A. The ABWG (EU side) will respond to the European Commission request for consultation for preparing future EU activities for integrating and opening national research infrastructures by 22 October 2012. 2) Action/ recommendation 1. Promote proposals focused on co-ordination type projects: NSF RCN and SAVI proposals EU COST. Ideally fund US and EU localized people. 3) Action/ recommendation 2. EU-US agencies should make the integration of biology and computing (hardware, accessibility, service and research components, computational and computer sciences) a high priority internally throughout their initiatives as well as through competitive programs to deepen and broaden stakeholder impact as well as contribute to the world’s science knowledgebases. 4) Action/ recommendation 3. Reuse, retooling and allowing animal researches to leverage and coordinate existing investments (could be other initiatives like iPlant, Kbase, could be XSEDE, could be NAL) into a more comprehensive CI. This not just about access to machines; the data and metadata need to be "accessible".
