Bioinformatics in Scotland

Scotland has an internationally unique, integrated bioinformatics research community that is recognised for its excellence in academia and industry world-wide. Scottish Bioinformatics' strengths lie in its close integration between biology and bioinformatics researchers, as well as in the wide range of interactions between universities and business.

The Scottish Government, its funding agencies and economic development agencies, have made it very clear that the political will for an integrated, international centre of excellence in bioinformatics is backed up by financial support for initiatives that will bolster this goal. A large sum has already been invested in the creation of a Scottish Bioinformatics Research Network (SBRN), that has as its focus the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee, and the government funded crop and animal research institutes.

The well funded Scottish Bioinformatics Forum (SBF) coordinates interactions in the network. The SBF also recommends themes, at a national level, for research collaborations, industry involvement, knowledge-transfer and commercialisation.

These activities are carried by the tremendous grass-roots support of researchers, who have a strong spirit of cooperation and sense of a Scottish Research Community. This strong sense of Scottish community enables collaboration and interactions that drive forward life science research faster than ever before.

The community effort is also reflected in the Scottish excellence in cross-discipline fields such as systems biology, in which Scotland has some of the world's leading researchers. Scottish strengths in bioinformatics include structure and function of biomolecules, genetics of complex diseases, pathway biology, functional genomics and high-throughput technologies, to name just a few.

This expertise and technology is being used to find answers and solutions in the fields of cancer, cardio-vascular, development, and infectious diseases research. As such Scotland performs an important role in promoting bioinformatics as a key enabling technology in medical and life science research and development.