The Steinbeck group has been instrumental in setting up a number of services for the scientific community, some of which we reference here.
NFDI4Chem
Christoph Steinbeck is the speaker of the Chemistry consortium (NFDI4Chem) within the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). NFDI4Chem is an initiative to build an open and FAIR infrastructure for research data management in chemistry. With our local team of NFDI4Chem software engineers and cheminformaticians, we are working with 26 partner institutions in Germany to make this vision reality.
de.NBI
As associate members of the German Network for Bioinformatics (Deutsches Netzwerk für Bioinformatik, de.NBI) we are offering services and training related to our expertises. Service provision will be based on our work on the following projects.
PhenoMeNal
PhenoMeNal (Phenome and Metabolome aNalysis) is a comprehensive and standardised e-infrastructure that supports the data processing and analysis pipelines for molecular phenotype data generated by metabolomics applications. An infrastructure aimed to address the H2020 Societal Challenge in Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing, PhenoMeNal provides services enabling computation and analysis to improve the understanding of the causes and mechanisms underlying health, healthy ageing and diseases.
MetaboLights
During our time at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) we established MetaboLights, now one of the leading databases for Metabolomics experiments and derived information. The database is cross-species, cross-technique and covers metabolite structures and their reference spectra as well as their biological roles, locations and concentrations, and experimental data from metabolic experiments. MetaboLights is the recommended Metabolomics repository for a number of leading journals, such as Nature Scientific Data, BioMed Central, Metabolomics, PLOS, F1000 and the EMBO journals. MetaboLights is hosted as a core resource at the European Bioinformatics Institute and now developed by the team of Claire O’Donovan. Our team will be co-developing MetaboLights under the auspices of the German Network for Bioinformatics (de.NBI) and ELIXIR Europe.
COSMOS
Metabolomics generates large and diverse sets of analytical data which impose significant challenges for e-infrastructures. In order to establish the necessary standards and policies to handle this data, we have assembled the COSMOS (COordination of Standards in MetabOlomicS) consortium of leading European groups in Metabolomics and we will interface with all interested players in Metabolomics world-wide in the Metabolomics community and beyond.
Specifically we worked to ensure that data is:
- Encoded in open standards to allow barrier-free and wide-spread analysis.
- Tagged with a community-agreed, complete set of metadata (minimum information standard).
- Supported by a communally developed set of open source data management and capturing tools.
- Disseminated in open-access databases adhering to the above standards.
- Supported by vendors and publishers, who require deposition upon publication
- Properly interfaced with data in other biomedical and life-science e-infrastructures (such as ELIXIR, BioMedBridges, EU-Openscreen).