EMBL-EBI

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.

“Data generated by biological experiments is doubling every five months, driven by vital collaborations such as the 1000 Genomes Project. Our mission at the EMBL-EBI is to make the results of these international collaborations freely available to the scientific community wherever they are located. To do this we need an infrastructure that is robust, flexible and high performance, linking us to our partners across the globe. Our close working relationship with the JANET and GÉANT networks delivers the speed and capacity that we need, giving us confidence and allowing us to focus on sharing data to push forward scientific progress.”

Dr Paul Flicek, Head of Vertebrate Genomics, EMBL-EBI.

Partners in the project:
GÉANT www.geant.net EBI www.ebi.ac.uk/ EMBL www.ebi.ac.uk/embl/ ESFRI ec.europa.eu/research/infrastructures/index_en.cfm?pg=esfri ORIENT www.dante.net/DANTE_Network_Projects/ORIENTplus/Pages/Home.aspx JANET www.ja.net