| | | Recent developments in ‘omics’ technologies as well as improvements in sampling and laboratory equipment have opened a new dimension in research of marine diversity and ecosystem functioning. Leading institutes of marine sciences have started to adopt these new technologies. Reflecting the size and complexity of the marine ecosystem, an unprecedented amount of environmental data, biodiversity data, as well as functional and organism-specific data are already produced or envisaged. This ever growing deluge of electronically available data needs to be processed, integrated and visualized for in depth analysis by domain experts with respect to a better understanding of evolution, niche adaptations and ecosystems functioning. In the first part of the talk an overview about the bioinformatic challenges in phylogenetic and functional diversity analysis will be given. In the second part the concept for a specialized ‘Marine Bioinformatics Institute’ in Germany designed as a node of the emerging European ELIXIR infrastructure will be shown.
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