GÉANT and EMBL-EBI – driving the bioinformatics revolution in life sciences
The Challenge
The DNA sequencing of thousands of organisms has revolutionised the life sciences world, unleashing huge volumes of data which is doubling every five months. Access to this information allows vital analysis to be completed, cost-effectively, in minutes rather than years. The challenge is to store, manage and integrate the skyrocketing volume and variety of biological information produced in life sciences research, and to make it available to the global scientific community
The Solution
The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is leading this revolution in information sharing. It collaborates with hundreds of partners around the world to manage terabytes of information from thousands of life sciences projects. Working in partnership, the GÉANT and JANET networks provide seamless, high-performance links between the EMBL-EBI in Cambridge, UK and scientists located throughout the world, enabling real-time, global access to the world’s largest collection of molecular databases.
Key Benefits
The results of large-scale, ground-breaking initiatives such as the 1000 Genomes Project can now be distributed and made available for analysis quickly. This kind of research has already been used in several important medical studies, and shows how genetic research is enabling rapid advances in the medical sciences.
