Biological & Medical science

Life Science Scientists and Haddock users

The scientific community of the HADDOCK portal consists of worldwide scientists working in the field of life sciences in general, with a particular focus on structural biology. More than 1000 laboratories are also using a local version of the software. Results from a recent survey indicate that about 33% of the user community are PhD students, 20% post-doctoral researchers and 33% research staff members. Interestingly, there is also a substantial share (~9%) of both bachelor and master students using the portal, indicating that the HADDOCK portal is also having an impact on education.

This can easily be explained by its ease of use that allows, for example, still inexperienced bachelor students to perform small research projects using HADDOCK. Next to mainly academic use, HADDOCK is also being used by a number of major pharmaceutical companies.


Biologists, pharmacologists, researchers in physical chemistry

Structural biology deals with the characterization of the structural (atomic coordinates) and dynamic (fluctuation of atomic coordinates over time) properties of biological macromolecules and adducts thereof. The dynamic properties of these systems are crucial to many aspects of their biological function. Researchers in the field largely rely on in silico simulations to tackle the dynamic aspect of structural biology (Molecular Dynamics Simulations).


Bioinformaticians and biohealth computer scientists

The “Galaxy as a service” platform aims to be adopted both by life scientists and bio-informaticians requiring a powerful computational infrastructure to run complex analyses over large datasets within the familiar Galaxy environment.

This solution is particularly suitable for small research groups, big institutions or SMEs which cannot or do not want to setup and maintain their own hardware and software infrastructure. Moreover, a Galaxy cloud service could be a practical solution for universities and other training facilities to teach basic and advanced bioinformatics. Finally, when bioinformatics protocols will be available for personalized medicine (e.g. pharmacogenomics) and Galaxy as cloud service will provide an easy-to-use (and learn) platform, ready to be used by healthcare operators. Moreover, a Galaxy cloud service could be a practical solution.

This solution is particularly suitable for small research groups, big institutions or SMEs which cannot or do not want to set up and maintain their own hardware and software infrastructure.

 

Application cases & demos

Cloudified service for molecular dynamics (MD) trajectories analysis using IAM, OneData and Docker

TRUFA: A user friendly tool for RNA sequencing

Launching POWERFIT and DISVIS Virtual Machine on EGI FedCloud using OneData, Infrastructure Manager and Docker

Deploying an elastic cluster with CLUES, Infrastructure Manager and the Orchestrator of the INDIGO DataCloud project

Molecular Dynamics of proteins