The Made-In-Israel Bioinformatics Portal

Bioinformatics tools are being developed at a rapid pace in Israel. Universities may have a listing of the tools that were developed in that university, as, for example, the Made-In-Weizmann site 1 developed by Dr Jaime Prilusky, whose assistance to us was invaluable. However, until now there has been no central national repository that made these tools available to researchers. Such a repository is being established by the Center of Knowledge for Bioinformatics Infrastructure. 2 The current state of the repository and the process gone through to develop the site are described here. COBI (Center of Knowledge for Bioinformatics Infrastructure), 3 headed by Prof. Marvin Edelman, is an initiative of the Israeli Ministry of Science to nationally strengthen bioinformatics education and infrastructure. As part of its mission to promote the development of bioinformatics tools in Israel, the centre determined (1) to establish a central gateway to all the activities going on in Israel and (2) to establish a professional, high-level hosting service for these tools. The purpose of developing a central repository for Israeli bioinformatics tools was to help researchers outside Israel to view and use these tools, as well as to promote collaborations within Israel and to make possible benchmarking, testing, improving, adding additional features and implementing emerging ideas into new tools. As common in academic initiatives, a committee was assembled to steer the project. The committee decided on a two-stage implementation programme. First, a portal will be developed to offer links to all the tools that have been developed in Israel. Later, tools will be imported gradually from their current locations to run on central servers that will offer professional maintenance, long up-time and fast access. The initial step was to conduct a survey. Questionnaires were circulated in all universities and research institutes in Israel to get an updated inventory of all the tools developed in Israel and to get an estimate of what will be needed in order to import them to the central Made-In-Israel server. Based on the survey results, it was decided to divide the tools into on-line servers and software download and to divide the subject matters into three broad categories: DNA analysis, protein analysis and global analysis. The site was launched in May 2004 and currently contains links to 24 on-line servers and 13 packages for download. On the on-line server tools, 14 are for proteins, 6 for DNA/RNA and 4 for global …