NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – A UK-China metabolomics data-sharing consortium has received £30,000 ($46,000) in grant funding from the UK's Biotechnology and Biological Research Council (BBSRC) under its China Partnering award program, which will support ongoing efforts to share and analyze metabolomics data.
The members of the consortium are the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the Universities of Birmingham, Manchester, and Oxford, the Sainsbury Laboratory, the UK's Genome Analysis Center, and BGI and its open-access journal GigaScience.
Specifically, the group will use the funds to host training workshops that will help scientists in the UK and China manage and share metabolomics data and analyses. As part of those efforts, they'll work with groups such as Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, the European Life-Sciences Infrastructure for Biological Information, and the Galaxy project.
"There is already a lot of commitment in [the] metabolomics research community to data sharing and reuse – our main challenge is simply in training people how best to incorporate this into their regular working practices," Christoph Steinbeck, team leader, cheminformatics and metabolism at EBI, said in a statement. "The BBSRC has recognized that this area of molecular biology is growing more quickly than any other, and that we need to do everything we can to train and support scientists in sharing data. That will lead to better quality data, more efficient research, and shorter time to discovery," he said.