Elena Bravo

Elena Bravo is Senior researcher at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (National Health Institute, ISS) in Rome. After graduation in Biochemistry at the University “La Sapienza” in Rome, and postgraduate formation in Clinical Chemistry, her research focused on metabolism of cholesterol, lipoproteins, and body lipid  homeostasis. From 2009 she is contributing to the Italian participation to BBMRI (Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure) and for this infrastructure she is actually the delegate of the Italian representative in European legal consortium BBMRI-ERIC, Member of National the Governance committee and responsible for the Secretariat of BBMRI-Italy at the ISS.

Currently, she is member of the Working group on Biobanking within the international ISO-Technical Committee 276 on Biotechnology and is the scientific responsible for the collaborative project ISS-CNR “The Italian Network of Biobanks and BioMolecular Resources (BBMRI-it). She coordinated   the project for the optimization of the Italian Network of Biobanks and to the construction of the Italian hub of population biobanks (HIBP). Her activity includes quality bioresource policy and management. She promotes implementation of publishing good practices and of the guideline “CoBRA” for the standardization of reporting bioresource use in scientific articles.  

When: Day 2 - 15th November, Session 9 : DMP Technical Services #Part 2, 12:00 - 13:00

CoBRA guideline : a tool to facilitate sharing, reuse, and reproducibility of bioresource-based research  

Abstract. Bioresources, collectively including biological samples and associated data as well as disease registries and organized collections of healthdata, are essential tool for biomedical research. In the absence of a standard, the use of a bioresource in a research article is not retrievable via PubMed or other bibliographic databases; and the information reported in the publication about the source of the samples and data used for the reaserch is not complete. In addition, the competence of the researchers that contributed to build and maintain the bioresource is not recognized.

The CoBRA (Citation of BioResources in journal Articles) is a reporting guideline for the Citation of BioResources in journal Articles. Since its publication in BMC Medicine in 2015, the CoBRA has attracted the interest of several scientific communities, which recognized the importance of having a standardized format to cite bioresources in order to facilitate the retrieval of journal articles based on the USE of biological samples/data and their tracing in the scientific literature.

The implementation of the  CoBRA improves the quality of scientific reporting and impacts on results comparability, with a positive effect on science reproducibility and reduction of research cost. Furthermore, citation favours the recognition of the biobanking infrastructure organization and of the  researcher work boosts the access to the bioresource and circulation of knowledge.