ESCOGITARE Project: Towards a Grid-based e-Science Infrastructure for the Italian Agricultural Research Council (CRA)

Advances in agricultural research have resulted in massive increases in the volume and variety of available data. In particular, the complexity of biological information necessitates powerful bioinformatics computational resources both at the level of storage and analysis of data. Moreover, the heterogeneous bioinformatics-related knowledge of scientists involved in agricultural research makes it fundamental to provide an in-situ training program dedicated to the most utilized computational tools. All these challenges are being tackled by the ”ESCOGITARE” project which should provide an e-Science based, virtual lab structure for plant and animal genomics to help in the understanding of important traits such as yield, stress resistance and quality. The recently founded Italian Agricultural Research Council can be considered as a good example of application of such a collaborative research approach due to the number of the belonging institutes and to the wide range of competences characterizing each of them.