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| Hinxton,
Monday 31 October 2005 |
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ENFIN! Computational systems biology comes to a lab bench near you |
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Press
Release 31 October 2005 [PDF]
The Commission of the European Union has awarded
EUR 9 million over five years for a new Network
of Excellence that will make computational systems
biology accessible to bench scientists throughout
Europe and beyond. ENFIN, which stands for 'Experimental
Network for Functional INtegration,' brings together
some of Europe's best computational and experimental
biology labs – 20 groups across 17 institutions
in 13 countries – to build a virtual institute
that will put Europe at the centre of the systems
biology revolution.
Genome sequencing and other high-throughput
technologies have triggered a renaissance in computational
biology: there's now a large, open-access database
for almost every type of biological information.
Yet the average biologist at the lab bench uses
only a tiny proportion of the information that is
relevant to the questions s/he is trying to answer.
Why is this? "To the bench scientist, computational
biology is like driving around an unfamiliar city:
you might be able to see your hotel, but finding
your way to the car park through the oneway system
can be a nightmare," explains the EMBLÐEuropean
Bioinformatics Institute's Ewan Birney, who will
coordinate ENFIN. "ENFIN will revise the town plan
so that frustrating one-way system no longer exists:
researchers will be able to go straight to the public
data that they want, combine it with their own unpublished
data and perform truly integrated analyses using
data from different types of experiments."
Birney and the ENFIN executive committee [see notes
for editors] will work with project managers whose
expertise spans database architecture [e.g. Henning
Hermjakob, EMBL-EBI; Geoff Barton, University of
Dundee] data analysis tools [e.g. Søren Brunak,
Technical University of Denmark; Eran Segal, Weizmann
Institute] and experimental molecular biology [e.g.
Carl-Henrick Heldin, Ludwig Institute for Cancer
Research, Uppsala; Erich Nigg, Max-Planck Institute
for Biochemistry, Martinsried] to create the next
generation of informatics resources for systems
biology.
ENFIN's products
will be applicable to any area of biological research,
but a strong experimental focus of the network is
understanding the regulation of cell division; this
process is deregulated in many diseases, most notably
cancer. By applying ENFIN's methods to this important
area of biomedical research, ENFIN will contribute
directly to the understanding of disease, in addition
to making a significant indirect contribution by
making the ENFIN infrastructure freely available
to researchers across the globe.
By combining the
expertise of both 'wet' and 'dry' biologists, ENFIN
will catalyse a social change in which computational
approaches will be incorporated into the molecular
biologist's tool set and will no longer be regarded
as the domain of the bioinformatician alone. "Only
once we can make databases and algorithms as commonplace
as pipettes and cell culture will we be in a position
to realise the full potential of molecular biology
in this new data-intensive world," concludes Birney.
Notes for Editors
ENFIN partner institutes [*denotes Executive Committee
member]:
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
Ewan Birney* [coordinator], EMBL-European Bioinformatics
Institute, Hinxton, UK
Jan Ellenberg, EMBL Heidelberg,
Germany
Henning Hermjakob, EMBL-European Bioinformatics
Institute, Hinxton, UK
University of Dundee, Scotland,
UK
Geoffrey J. Barton
Technical University of Denmark
Søren Brunak
University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy
Gianni Cesareni*
Medical Research Council Mammalian
Genetics Unit, Harwell, UK
John Hancock
Ludwig Institute
for Cancer Research, Uppsala, Sweden
Carl-Henrik
Heldin*
Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried,
Germany
Edda Klipp
Erich Nigg
University of Helsinki,
Finland
Tomi Mäkelä
University College London, UK
Christine Orengo*
National Center for Research and
Technology, Greece
Christos Ouzounis
National Consortium
for Genomics Research, France
Vincent Schachter*
University of Cologne, Germany
Dietmar Schomburg
Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel
Eran Segal
Egeen,
Estonia
Jaak Vilo
Serono Pharmaceutical Research
Institute, Switzerland
Ioannis Xenarios
Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Cient'ficas, Madrid,
Spain
Alfonso Valencia
Centre for Integrative Bioinformatics
VU, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Jaap Heringa
Press Contacts
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
Sarah Sherwood
EMBL Information Officer, European Molecular Biology
Laboratory, Meyerhofstrasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg,
Germany
Tel: +49 [0] 6221 387125
E-mail: sarah.sherwood@embl.de |
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