EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is an intergovernmental organization (IGO) which, as part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) family, focuses on research and services in bioinformatics. It is located on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge, and employs over 600 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff. Institute leaders such as Rolf Apweiler, Alex Bateman, Ewan Birney, and Guy Cochrane, an adviser on the National Genomics Data Center Scientific Advisory Board, serve as part of the international research network of the BIG Data Center at the Beijing Institute of Genomics. Additionally, the EMBL-EBI hosts training programs that teach scientists the fundamentals of the work with biological data and promote the plethora of bioinformatic tools available for their research, both EMBL-EBI and non-EMBL-EBI-based. Bioinformatic services One of the roles of the EMBL-EBI is to index and maintain biological data in a set of databases, including Ensembl (housing whole genome sequence data), UniProt (protein sequence and annotation database) and Protein Data Bank (protein and nucleic acid tertiary structure database). A variety of online services and tools is provided, such as Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) or Clustal Omega sequence alignment tool, enabling further data analysis. BLAST BLAST is an algorithm for the comparison of biomacromolecule primary structure, most often nucleotide sequence of DNA/RNA and amino acid sequence of proteins, stored in the bioinformatic databases, with the query sequence. The algorithm utilizes scoring of the available sequences against the query by a scoring matrix such as BLOSUM 62. The highest scoring sequences represent the closest relatives of the query, in terms of functional and evolutionary similarity.