European Bioinformatics Institute

Principal Investigator

Dr. Paul Flicek Phone +44-1223-492581 Fax +44-1223-494468 Contact

Project Staff

Institute Presentation

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Cambridge, UK (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/), is a non-profit academic organisation that forms part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). The EMBL-EBI is a world-renowned centre for research and services in bioinformatics and is the European node for globally coordinated efforts to collect and disseminate biological data. Headed by Prof Janet Thornton, the Institute provides databases of biological data including nucleic acids (EMBLbank), protein sequences (UniProt), macromolecular structures (MSD), and transcriptomics (ArrayExpress), and genome annotation (Ensembl). The major mission of the EMBL-EBI is to ensure that the growing body of information from molecular biology and genome research is placed in the public domain and is accessible freely to all facets of the scientific community in ways that promote scientific progress. The EMBL-EBI also plays an active role in bionformatics training and research and has an extensive industry support programme addressing the particular needs of pharmaceutical companies and SMEs.

The EMBL-EBI will lead WP3 (Data Storage and Access) and will contribute significantly to WP4 (Analysis Tools) and WP6 (Training). Within these roles they coordinate the integrational analysis of the data produced by the infrastructure, develop tools to ensure that the data can be effectively mined in support of analysis in the project and ensure that the data will be successfully disseminated using resources such as the EGA (European Genome-phenome Archive). Dr Flicek leads the EGA project and also co-leads the data coordination centre (DCC) of the 1000 Genomes Project and has worked extensively with other key members of the consortium. Dr Lappalainen provides day-to-day management of the EGA and supervises the development of the project.