The EBI's robotic sequencing building at Hinxton Hall.
The European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) will lead FELICS, in partnership with the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics, the University of Cologne, Germany, and the European Patent Office. The aim is to develop, enhance and interlink the most important data sources and make them more accessible to the scientific community worldwide. This award, under Framework Programme 6, is the largest ever for computing infrastructure to support biological research.
The EBI, Europe’s pre-eminent curator and disseminator of biological data, is based at Hinxton Hall, Cambridge, UK. It has played a leading role in ensuring genome sequences are provided free to scientists and the public. Its predecessor, the EMBL Data Library, launched the world’s first public database of DNA sequences in the early 1980s.
FELICS will include many of the EBI’s well-known databases, but will also feature new resources, for example, it will support the University of Cologne in making access to its BRENDA enzyme database free.
In addition, FELICS will offer specific support for accessing patent literature in collaboration with the European Patent Office. Another database CheBI, a library of chemical entities of biological interest, is also part of the project.
“Bioinformatics now pervades biology,” said Graham Cameron, Associate director of the EBI and coordinator of FELICS. “Bioinformatics experts no longer sit between biologist and database. Researchers expect to directly access databases and do real work. FELICS gives scientists the electronic right to roam the biological knowledge space.”
User-friendly software, developed within FELICS and other EU-funded projects will facilitate navigation of that space.
Biomolecular databases have become a crucial part of the scientific infrastructure. The EBI’s site currently receives around 2 million hits every day, and this is forecast to rise to ten million within the next five years.
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