Generation of a virtual research environment (VRE) for implementing collaborative research among partners, e.g. for communication, tool/resource sharing, experiment management / planning / execution / interpretation, data storing, documents sharing, shared writing, etc.A Virtual Research Environment will be powered by D4Science to have a ready to use web-based working environments specifically conceived to provide I-GENE community with the needed facilities (services, data, capacity). It provides an environment to foster large-scale collaborations where many potentially geographically distributed co-workers can access and process large amount of data. This is realised through a) a continuously updated list of news produced by users and applications that becomes an easy-to-use trigger of timeline of user-centric facts; b) a folder-base file system to manage complex information objects, including files, datasets, workflows, and maps in a seamless way; c) a data-space for exchanging large datasets with co-workers easily and security; d) an experiment-space for exchanging analytical methods with co-workers and use them concurrently to validate scientific hypothesis. General project needs: by combining the above described facilities, the Virtual Research Environment will offer reliable, secure, and trusted access to data and scalable, reproducible, and reusable data analytics tools enabling collaborative analysis, validation, and exploitation of the generated products among users (partners and stakeholders).The VRE technology will be designed to promote the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable) principles.