LifeWatch Italy (hereafter LW-ITA), national node of LifeWatch ERIC, is designed in order to manage data on taxonomy, functional traits and properties, interactions and ecological niche of individuals, populations and species, abiotic data and other types of observation data. The e-infrastructure provides tools and services for data archiving, access, quality control, harmonization, integration and analysis.Thanks to the funding received from the project Bio4IU – multidisciplinary infrastructure for study and enhancement of marine and terrestrial Biodiversity in the perspective of the “Innovation Union” – (PONa3_0025), the MoBiLab (Molecular Biodiversity Lab) has been established and recently enhanced in the framework of the distributed Laboratory of “Molecular Biodiversity” of LW-ITA under the coordination of the Institute of Biomembranes, Bioenergetics and Molecular Biotecnologies (IBIOM -CNR) and the University of Bari. It integrates skills and advanced facilities to provide the scientific community with services and counselling for the molecular analysis of biodiversity. Innovative lab instruments and protocols for nucleic acids deep sequencing are associated with powerful ICT components for the management and analysis of produced data. In particular, this infrastructure, now well established and full capacity operating, holds Illumina MiSeq, Illumina NextSeq500 and Nanopore MinION systems interfaced with bioinformatics analysis tools suitably supported by powerful computing platforms hosted at the ReCaS data center, provided by the University of Bari and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN).
In order to promote the research in the field of Molecular Biodiversity and the multidisciplinary integration of the Italian groups interested in biodiversity studies and of their research applications, LW-ITA invites the interested researchers to submit projects proposals involving the production of molecular data through “Next Generation sequencing” technologies (e.g. sequencing of amplicons, genomes, metagenomes, transcriptomes and meta-transcriptomes) and their bioinformatic analysis. Info