Dear colleagues of the “Italian Life Sciences Federation,” the exceptional development of high-throughput technologies, particularly next-generation sequencing platforms, has given a very strong impetus to the research and development of biotechnology applications in biomedical, environmental and agribusiness fields.

The management and analysis of data produced daily by laboratories around the world cannot in turn be separated from adequate bioinformatics infrastructure, the implementation and management of which is beyond the capabilities of individual local or even national organizations. In this context, work is under way to build ELIXIR (European Infrastructure for biological information), whose mission is to design and implement a sustainable European infrastructure for the management and analysis of biological information, particularly that in the field of “omics” sciences, to support scientific research in the life sciences and its translatability for medicine, the environment, biotechnology companies and society.

In this scenario, Italian participation in ELIXIR is certainly strategic. Italy signed the Memorandum of Understanding for participation in Elixir in July 2012, and the CNR, due to its territorial spread and breadth of disciplinary fields, is coordinating the Italian node through a Joint Research Unit (JRU) involving many academic and infrastructure institutions. The hope is that the Elixir Consortium Agreement (ECA), which would sanction Italy’s formal membership in this large and fundamental infrastructure, will also be signed soon.

In light of the above, in order to provide ministerial bodies with a quantitative and qualitative measure of the impact of bioinformatics in research excellence at the national level we are promoting a survey of the most prestigious publications in the last 5 years that have been contributed by Italian bioinformaticians.

We are therefore asking you to point us to papers, not only of an exclusively bioinformatics nature, but also more broadly in the area of Cell and Molecular Biology, Genetics, Biochemistry, or even other disciplines, that have been published since 2009 in journals with Impact Factor greater than 7 and/or with number of citations