Briefs

NEW YORK, Jan. 27 (GenomeWeb News) - The Commission of the European Union has awarded �12 million to 24 bioinformatics groups based in 14 European countries to create the so-called BioSapiens Network of Excellence in Bioinformatics.

The network will create a pan-European "virtual research institute" and will also support a European school for training in bioinformatics, according to a statement from the European Bioinformatics Institute, one of the centers in the network.

The grant was awarded under the sixth Framework Program (FP6), the EU's main means of funding research in Europe.

The BioSapiens Network's first project will be a distributed genome annotation project. Each center, or network "node," will focus on one aspect of genome annotation. The results will be integrated via the Distributed Annotation System (DAS), developed by Lincoln Stein at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and made freely accessible through a single portal on the web.