Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Organizations Supporting Biosciences

Emergence of advanced complex applications in applied sciences poses many challenges to both the scientists and the developers of tools and mechanisms for their supporting infrastructure. Although technological advances in high-throughput / high-performance technologies provide the base, tackling the challenges in this area require long-term multi-disciplinary efforts between scientists and computer science experts. One such multi-disciplinary effort is started in bio-informatics, considering the growing complexity of emerging experiments and data processing requirements in biosciences domain. Among others, challenges in bio-sciences include designing experiments that utilize advanced technologies for storage, manipulation, and integration/interlinking of vast amounts of data produced by experiments, analysis of results on high-performance computers, and accessing the highly heterogeneous information that resides at geographically scattered centers. In this paper, we propose an “enhancement environment” for a virtual laboratory approach, supporting scientists to overcome the above problems and assisting them during their experimentation. Furthermore, we describe how this enhancement environment can be extended applying the virtual organizations concept and infrastructures, to support the collaborative experiments among diverse, heterogeneous and autonomous centers in the biosciences domain1.