ELIXIR Italy
ELIXIR Italy (ELIXIR-IT) is the Italian node of ELIXIR Europe, coordinated by the National Research Council (CNR), and acts as the Italian Infrastructure for Bioinformatics (IIB), bringing together national research institutions — including the University of Bologna — to provide integrated, high-quality bioinformatics services for the life science community. The network comprises 31 member institutions, organised around 6 technical Platforms, 18 scientific Communities and 9 Focus Groups, and reports over 130 publications and more than 190,000 service citations in a recent year.
What you'll find on this site
Activities
How the Bologna node contributes to ELIXIR at both levels: the ELIXIRxNextGenIT project in ELIXIR Italy, and active roles in the ELIXIR Europe Tools and Data Platforms, the Rare Disease and Federated Human Data Communities (including the AMP4RD commissioned service), and the AI Ecosystem Focus Group.
Services
The node's catalogue of predictive bioinformatics web servers and databases for variant-effect prediction, protein structure/stability, membrane protein and localisation analysis, and protein-protein interactions — many of them registered in bio.tools.
People
The core team behind the node: Pier Luigi Martelli, Castrense Savojardo, Emidio Capriotti and Matteo Manfredi, spanning the Biocomputing Group and BioFolD laboratory.
Infrastructure
The dedicated Linux compute clusters at biofold.org and biocomp.unibo.it that run the node's public predictors and support model training, large-scale annotation jobs and teaching activities.
Training
The node's role in the International Master in Bioinformatics / Molecular and Computational Biology, and in organising the long-running Bologna Winter School (latest edition: "Bioinformatics and Rare Diseases", Feb 2026).
News
Recent events co-organised by the node: the 2025 ELIXIR Rare Disease Community face-to-face meeting in Bologna, the 27th Bologna Winter School (Feb 2026), and the SIB Computational and Systems Biology Group Meeting 2026 (June 2026, Bologna).