Main Page

From dtls
Jump to: navigation, search

Welcome to the wiki of DTL, the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences. This wiki is intended for collaboration among people partipicating in DTL's interest groups and working groups. Please refer to the DTL website for general information about DTL's activities, events, announcements etc. For an account on this wiki, please mail Rob Hooft

What is DTL?

The Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences (DTL), is an institute that assembles the people working on the basic service technologies that are needed to do modern life science research. These people are not colocated, but work together from their usual locations in companies and academic centers. DTL is a reincarnation of a number of NGI technology institutes that were set up independently earlier.

Around 2003, the Dutch government has started an investment in life sciences research. Among others, this has resulted in setting up the Netherlands Genomics Initiative, which coordinated a lot of individual institutes that developed technologies in the Life Sciences. Some of these technologies have since developed into self-sustaining companies. Others have developed a supporting infrastructure that can not become self-sustaining companies but which have a facilitating role to the practical application-directed life sciences research. These technology-related centers, together with a number of other interested partners, have set up DTL. This is a new institute without a building and with only a small staff; it collects the existing expertise and brings it together. There is no government funding for DTL, but institutional members of DTL pay a small membership fee to make the collaborations possible.

What are the three DTL Programme lines?

Activities in the DTL partnership are concentrated in three DTL programmes:

  • Data – drives professional data integration and data stewardship, focussing on sharing of methodologies, expertise, tools and infrastructures in bioinformatics, medical informatics, e-science & computational biology
  • Technologies – enables the (combined) use of technologies in research, with easy access to expertise and facilities in multi-omics and bioimaging, and including the preprocessing of raw data from wet-lab technologies for integration and analysis in DTL Data.
  • Learning – promotes training and education in data stewardship and in frontier integration of technologies in data-intensive life science. The DTL learning network links training expertise across sectors and connects international initiatives.

Interest and Working groups

Across the programmes, DTL is organized in interest groups (people discussing topics together) and working groups (people working on a deliverable together). Active groups are: