About Technology Hotels

Technology Hotels are expert groups that offer their high-end technologies and the associated expertise and infrastructure to researchers who do not have access to such facilities at their home institute. DTL’s searchable catalogue of Technology Hotels enables you to quickly locate the expert group that you need for your research.

Public and private
Around 130 Dutch life science expert groups have registered their facilities or expertise as DTL-associated ‘Technology Hotel’.

  • Public Technology Hotels are public research organisations that offer other researchers access to their high-end equipment and expertise in applying high-end analytical technologies in biological research projects. Hotel guests are life scientists that have no access to these particular technological facilities or expertise at their home institute. Access to the Hotels’ advanced expertise and infrastructure can be offered on a collaborative or cost-recovery basis.
  • Private Technology Hotels (also called ‘Service Providers’) are companies that offer technology services, mostly on a cost-recovery basis. The aim here is to provide (cost-)effective access to state-of-the-art technology services for research groups and other companies within the life sciences field.

Diverse profile
The Technology Hotels have a diverse profile:

  • specialised in technologies ranging from bioimaging to bioinformatics, genomics, medical imaging, metabolomics, phenotyping, proteomics, structural biology, and systems biology;
  • involved in life sciences domains ranging from health to agro, nutrition, industrial microbiology, ecology, and biodiversity;
  • located at universities, university medical centres, research institutes or private companies across the Netherlands.

Platform
DTL acts as a platform for the Technology Hotels to collaborate and coordinate their activities, across life science domains and across technologies. Gathering in a national network enables the groups to

  • make facilities and expertise findable and accessible (catalogue of hotels),
  • organise funding for hotel guests (ZonMw/NWO Enabling Technologies Hotels programme),
  • exchange best practices, harmonise data generation and treatment processes, and develop and share standard operating procedures (Interest Group and Focus Meetings, see below),
  • boost good data stewardship, data integration, and data reuse (Interest Group and Focus Meetings, see below).

Interest Group 
There is a special Technology Hotel Interest Group, which organises regular meetings for Technology Hotel managers on topics like pre-processing methods of raw analytical data, data management and data stewardship, quality and LIMS systems, and integration of omics data sets. Please contact Merlijn van Rijswijk if you want to know more about this.

Focus meetings
DTL organises Focus Meetings to assist Technology Hotels in implementing FAIR data stewardship practices. Check the events list for upcoming Focus Meetings. Previous meetings include: