National Research Infrastructures

It is essential that the Biogenouest core facilities position themselves as well as possible in the national and European landscape.

The Biogenouest Steering Committee and Animation Unit, in conjunction with the Regions and the Regional Academic Delegations for Research and Innovation (DRARI), have been carrying out actions for several years on various recognition objectives:

• National recognition through the IBiSA label, which remains an important objective for the Biogenouest core facilities, and through integration into the National Biology and Health Research Infrastructures (INBS) included in the roadmap;
• European recognition with the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) roadmap.

In 2018 and 2019, Biogenouest was heavily involved in the upgrading of imaging skills and equipment in vivo of the Great West with the coordinator of the France Life Imaging (FLI) infrastructure. The objective was to make appear in the FLI-2 project a Western France node which integrates the imaging core facilities in vivo Biogenouest, namely PRISM, Neurinfo and Arronax (CIMA project: Center for Applied Multimodal Imaging). At the beginning of 2020, the DGRI Health Biotechnologies steering committee gave a very favorable opinion to the enlarged FLI project, thus integrating the large western node, and granted the infrastructure funding for the period of June 2020 to June 2025.

In October 2019, following the final evaluation of the PIA 1 INBS, and positive for the France-BioImaging (FBI) infrastructure, the FBI supervisory committee unanimously decided to expand its scope to the candidate node Bretagne-Loire. This node brings together the Biogenouest core facilities: MRic, H2P2, MicroPICell and APEX. It is the culmination of a work of several years which is rewarded.

In 2019, Biogenouest also supported the request to integrate the Corsaire metabolomics core facility into the MetaboHUB national research infrastructure. The roadmap for phase 2, until 2025, provides for the extension of the scope of the infrastructure to 3 Corsaire devices, namely Laberca, Ceisam and P2M2.

for the FRISBI National Research Infrastructure, which will be restricted to 3 nodes (Soleil, ESRF and Strasbourg), the "electronic" part of the MRic core facility is not directly part of the infrastructure, but is included in the new FRISBI roadmap and as such participates in discussions and decisions.

As far as France Bio-Imaging (FBI) is concerned, the Bretagne-Loire node initially included MRic, MicroPICell, H2P2 and APEX. In 2021, the APEX core facility had to choose to belong to a single national infrastructure and decided to keep Neuratris. Despite this, the current dynamic between the 4 core facilities will be maintained. The multi-modality proof-of-concept project without marking to demonstrate the complementarity between the core facilities was launched with the recruitment of an engineer funded by Biogenouest.

At the start of 2022, 19 Biogenouest core facilities are involved in 10 different national Research Infrastructures.

The Animation Unit continues to promote with the managers of the Biogenouest core facilities their rapprochement and/or integration into the national Research Infrastructures.