EMMA partner



EMBL - European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton UK

Logo EBI

The Wellcome Trust Genome Campus
Hinxton
Cambridge CB10 1SD
United Kingdom

 

EMLB building The European Molecular Biology Laboratory is a basic research institute funded by public research monies from 18 member states, including most of the EU, Switzerland and Israel. Research at EMBL is conducted by approximately 80 independent groups covering the spectrum of molecular biology. The Laboratory has five units: the main Laboratory in Heidelberg, and Outstations in Hinxton (the European Bioinformatics Institute), Grenoble, Hamburg, and Monterotondo near Rome.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge (UK). The EBI grew out of EMBL's pioneering work in providing public biological databases to the research community. It hosts some of the world's most important collections of biological data, including DNA sequences (EMBL-Bank), protein sequences (UniProt), animal genomes (Ensembl), three-dimensional structures (the Macromolecular Structure Database) and data from microarray experiments (ArrayExpress). The EBI hosts several research groups and its scientists continually develop new tools for the biocomputing community.There is a huge in house expertise on databases, which will be shared with the partners. Therefore the EBI has all the expertise needed to undertake its part in this project.

Ewan Birney will supervise the project at the EBI. He is the Principal Investigator of the EBI's Ensembl team, which provides an easy-to-use and free for all database of the human genome, along with the genomes of several other higher animals. He joined the EBI in 2000 having completed a BA in Biochemistry at Oxford and a PhD at the Sanger Centre. In December 2003 he was the first recipient of the Royal Society's Francis Crick Award, in recognition of his contribution to the analysis of the genome sequences of key organisms including humans.

Jitka Sengerova acts as the responsible Technical Officer for the database development and will ensure that any developments in this project will be compatible with other research in the bioinformatics community. She is also participating in the Activity Group Leaders meetings.