In a Nutshell
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The European Bioinformatics Institute In a nutshell The European Bioinformatics Institute In a nutshell EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute Wellcome Trust Genome Campus Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD United Kingdom Web: www.ebi.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)1223 494 444 Fax: +44 (0)1223 494 468 E-mail: [email protected] Twitter: @emblebi Facebook: /EMBLEBI Copyright © 2012 EMBL-EBI Photos courtesy of EMBL Photolab, Wellcome Images, Andrew Cowley and Samuel Kerrien. Find this and other EMBL-EBI publications at www.ebi.ac.uk/information/brochures The European Bioinformatics Institute In a nutshell The hub of bioinformatics in Europe 4 Who we are 6 Where we are 7 How we’re funded 7 Services 8 Research 10 Training 12 Supporting industry 13 European context 14 The hub of bioinformatics in Europe The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is an academic research institute based in the UK, and is Our mission part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory • To provide freely available data and (EMBL). Established in 1994, EMBL-EBI and grew bioinformatics services to all facets of the out of EMBL’s commitment to making biological scientific community in ways that promote data and information accessible to life scientists in all scientific progress disciplines. • To contribute to the advancement of biology We serve the scientific community by providing through basic investigator-driven research in freely available bioinformatics resources, promoting bioinformatics basic research, providing training to scientists at all • To provide advanced bioinformatics training levels and disseminating cutting-edge technologies to to scientists at all levels, from PhD students to industry. independent investigators We manage several large, public databases containing • To help disseminate cutting-edge biological data and information spanning genomics, technologies to industry gene expression, proteomics, structural biology, • To coordinate biological data provision cheminformatics, pathways and systems. We throughout Europe. create tools that allow researchers to analyse this information, and to upload and share their work. Because access to large data sets is a basic requirement for life science research, we provide user training on Strength through collaboration site, at host institutes throughout the world and in Our major data resources are the products of Train online, our free online training resource. We international collaborations. We work with other data also offer extensive training to our industry partners. providers to ensure that our data repositories, and those EMBL-EBI offers a top-quality research environment of our collaborators, are comprehensive and up to date. with countless opportunities for interdisciplinary For example: collaboration. The research we do helps to inform the • The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) is services we provide, and vice versa. produced by the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration. The other partners are Why bioinformatics is important GenBank in the US and the DNA Databank of Japan. We define ‘bioinformatics’ as the application of • The UniProt databases contain protein sequence computer technology to the storage, management and and annotation data that is maintained cooperatively analysis of biological data. This is essential for research by three centres: EMBL-EBI, the SIB Swiss Institute in all areas of life science, such as health, agriculture, of Bioinformatics and the Protein Information biodiversity, energy and biotechnology. Resource in the US. The ultimate goal of bioinformatics is to identify • PDBe, our macromolecular structure database, is biologically meaningful information in experimental the European arm of the worldwide Protein Data data so that we can gain a better understanding of Bank (wwPDB). The other partners are the Research organisms on many different levels – from chemical Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics and the reactions to entire systems. Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank in the US Technologies such as DNA sequencing produce and the Protein Data Bank of Japan (PDBj). incredible amounts of new information every day. In • Ensembl, a joint project between EMBL-EBI and the fact, the volume of data generated in these experiments Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, develops a software doubles every five months or so, while processor power system that produces and maintains automatic and storage double only every two years. annotation on selected eukaryotic genomes. But storage is only one part of the challenge. New • IntAct, our protein interactions resource, is a types of data are constantly emerging, and need to contributing database to the International Molecular be integrated with the old. We are always looking Exchange Consortium (IMEx). IMEx holds a non- for innovative ways to collect, store, retrieve and add redundant set of protein–protein interaction data value to biological data so that it can be analysed in from a broad taxonomic range of organisms. It is meaningful ways. funded by the European Commission. 4 www.ebi.ac.uk/information/brochures A unique working environment We share the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in rural Cambridgeshire with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and are part of one of the world’s largest concentrations of expertise in genomics, bioinformatics and computational biology. The campus in Hinxton is set in 22 hectares of parkland on the banks of the river Cam. We have the advantage of being housed in modern buildings in a beautiful setting, whilst being only a few miles away from the academic centre of Cambridge. The campus provides an inspiring environment for all staff. We are regularly visited by some of the greatest minds in biomedical research, and the workshops, seminars and conferences held on campus are open to all staff. Our personnel, including long-term visiting scholars, hail from 48 different countries. This chart shows the nationalities of our members of staff as of December 2011. We have excellent computational facilities and a comprehensive library. The campus also enjoys a highly active social life, with events held on campus throughout the year and all manner of sports teams. We have a gym, a choice of places to eat, and free transport by shuttle bus to Cambridge, Saffron Walden and some of the surrounding villages. If you would like to visit EMBL-EBI, you can register for one of our Open Days, which we hold twice a year. www.ebi.ac.uk/training/openday For information about getting to the campus, please see the inside back cover. Setting standards We actively participate in international efforts to develop data standards, which are essential for ensuring the accuracy of the scientific record. For example, EMBL-EBI was a leading partner in developing the MIAME standard, which sets out the minimum information required to describe a microarray experiment in a published article. The MIABE standard, published in collaboration with our Industry Programme partners, describes the minimum information required to describe a bioactive entity. Another example is the Human Proteome Organisa- tion’s Proteomics Standards Initiative (PSI), which develops standards for data from experiments involv- ing molecular interactions, mass spectrometry, pro- tein separations, protein modifications and protein informatics. www.ebi.ac.uk/information/brochures 5 Leadership Janet Thornton Rolf Apweiler Ewan Birney Director Co-Associate Director Co-Associate Director Professor Dame Janet Thornton has been Director Ewan Birney has had strategic responsibility and of EMBL-EBI since October 2001. Her research oversight for all nucleotide databases at EMBL-EBI, group focuses on understanding biological including the Ensembl genome browser for verte- processes from a structural perspective using brate species, Ensembl Genomes for non-vertebrate computational approaches. After a physics degree, species and the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), she moved into biophysics at the National Institute major sequence resource. Ewan played a vital role for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London. Before in annotating the genome sequences of the human, moving to EMBL-EBI she held a joint appointment mouse, chicken and several other organisms; this at University College London and the Bernal Chair work has had a profound impact on our understand- in the Crystallography Department at Birkbeck ing of genomic biology. He currently leads the analy- College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a sis group for the ENCODE project, which is defining Member of EMBO and a foreign associate of the US functional elements in the human genome. Ewan is National Academy of Sciences. one of the founders of the Ensembl genome browser, and is an active researcher in a number of areas. He Rolf Apweiler and Ewan Birney took on the completed his PhD at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Associate Directorship of EMBL-EBI in 2012, and Institute, and has been at EMBL-EBI since 2000. have strategic oversight of our core resources. They follow in the footsteps of Graham Cameron, who played a key role in launching EMBL-EBI and was responsible for our bioinformatics services until his retirement in March 2012. Rolf has been responsible for vital protein and pro- teomics reference databases at EMBL-EBI, including the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt), a joint ef- fort with the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the Protein Information Resource in the US; InterPro, for cataloguing protein families and domains; PRIDE experimental proteomics data; IntAct, for molecular