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| Hinxton,
Tuesday, 1 February 2005 |
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| European bioinformatics grid receives 8 million Euro |
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Press
Release 1 February 2005 [PDF]
The Commission of the European Union has awarded
8.3 million Euro to a pan-European task force who
will improve access to biological information for
scientists throughout and beyond Europe. The EMBRACE
Network of Excellence, which encompasses computational
biologists from 17 institutes in 11 countries and
is coordinated by the European Bioinformatics Institute's
Associate Director Graham Cameron, will use these
funds to simplify and standardize the way in which
biological information is served to the researchers
who use it.
Scientists now depend on databases to
access the avalanche of information that they produce.
For example, geneticists are trawling through the
human genome for genes that are involved in diseases.
Data providers put a huge amount of effort into
providing data resources that are comprehensive,
user-friendly and cross-linked to other databases;
but different data providers use different methods.
This means that a researcher might have to search
ten or more different databases to find all the
information pertaining to a particular set of candidate
genes. If they're doing these kinds of searches
on a regular basis, they'll want their own local
copies of the databases. Maintaining up-to-date
and fully functioning versions of all those databases
and the tools to search them is a huge and complex
task.
Vincent Breton [CNRS, Clermont-Ferrand, France],
a member of EMBRACE's Executive Board, describes
the problem as analogous to the use of electrical
items before the electrical grid. "You didn't know
whether your gadget's plug would fit the socket,"
he says.
EMBRACE will turn the relationship between
user and provider on its head by enabling data providers
to provide well-defined interfaces to their databases
that will conform to the same standards, essentially
creating a 'data grid' – the EMBRACEgrid – that
will allow users to make the most of dispersed data
resources.
To ensure that EMBRACE's efforts are
immediately useful to biologists, Europe's most
heavily used biomolecular databases and tools will
be integrated into the EMBRACEgrid. A 'technology
watch' will ensure that the EMBRACEgrid doesn't
become locked into technology that is quickly superseded.
The grid will also receive regular workouts using
test problems, such as identifying candidate genes
for a disease or linking viral mutations to their
ability to cause disease. Disseminating information
about the EMBRACEgrid will be vital to ensure that
scientists throughout Europe not only use the new
technology, but also help to expand the capabilities
of the EMBRACEgrid by 'grid enabling' their own
data resources.
"Many elegant and powerful computational
biology tools are under-utilized," says EMBRACE
Executive Board member Erik Bongcam-Rudloff [University
of Uppsala, Sweden]. "EMBRACE will allow us to unlock
their potential by standardizing access to them."
Press Contact Cath Brooksbank PhD
EMBL-EBI Scientific Outreach Officer Wellcome Trust
Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK
Tel: +44 [0]1223 492525,
E-mail: cath@ebi.ac.uk
Trista Dawson
EMBL Press Officer, European Molecular Biology Laboratory,
Meyerhofstrasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
Tel: +49 [0] 6221 3878452
E-mail: trista.dawson@embl.de |
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