Welcome to BIOCHAIN-AI: A platform for securely sharing and analysing microbiological data

Objective: Developing of a blockchain-based platform for securely sharing microbiological collections and for performing federated analyses on such data.

Brief Description:

BIOCHAIN-AI aims at developing a platform for managing data of biological collections of a consortium. The platform registers the requests, and their responses, to the digital information. In particular, what has been requested, who requested the information, when, and for what purpose.
In addition, it will allow the members of the consortium to perform computational analyses for exploiting public and private information in a federated learning fashion. In this way, members owing specific rights on a given data are motivated to share their data because they are rewarded by the possibility of combining it with data owned by other members to perform holistic analyses, without explicitly revealing the data itself.

 The platform will be composed of two layers. A layer will implement the security aspects of the platform and it will ensure the fairness among the members of the consortium. In fact, by means of a distributed ledger system (a blockchain), data sharing transactions will be registered such that every member actively stores and verifies them. The data itself will be stored off-chain, and it will be identified by a unique identifier, that will primarily be the hash code of the information contained in it. Access to the data will be guaranteed by smart contracts that will be run over the blockchain. The smart contracts will interact with the second layer of the platform that will be responsible for defining the protocol for exposing the data and for requesting it, and for managing federated learning jobs. 

It is expected that the prototype, as well as future developments if it, will have a high impact on the national and European network of institutions regarding microbiology. Microbial resources are of great interest for many research fields such as agri-food (biofertilizers and biopesticides for sustainable agriculture, starter, protective or aromatic strains to produce fermented foods), human health (nutraceuticals, probiotics, human microbiomes for personalized medicine), environment (bioremediation strategies and development of bioprocesses aimed at obtaining compounds of technological interest, like nanomaterials).

News: We were at BITS (Bioinformatics Italian Society) 2021 Annual Meeting in Verona!