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| Hinxton, 25 April 2006 |
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| A brighter future for Europe's favourite molecular
biology software package
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Press
Release 25 April 2006 [PDF]
New funding for EMBOSS - Europe's leading suite of molecular biology analysis tools
- guarantees open access for researchers and software developers
EMBOSS, the European Molecular
Biology Open Software Suite, has received a vital funding
boost from the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences
Research Council [BBSRC] that will guarantee its continued
maintenance under an open source license for the next three
years. This ends two years of uncertainty over the future of the
project.
Until recently, EMBOSS was hosted by the Medical Research
Council's Rosalind Franklin Centre for Genomics Research
[RFCGR], where it was funded jointly by the BBSRC and the
Medical Research Council [see notes for editors for more
information on the history of EMBOSS]. With the announcement
in April 2004 of the RFCGR's closure, the future of
EMBOSS hung in the balance. The new funding from the
BBSRC means that EMBOSS co-founders Peter Rice and Alan
Bleasby will be able to continue the EMBOSS project at the
EMBL-EBI for the next three years. EMBOSS will remain
freely available from emboss.sourceforge.net and anyone who
wants to develop it further will have access to its source code.
"We're delighted that the BBSRC has recognized EMBOSS as
an important tool for molecular biology" says project leader
Peter Rice. "The EMBOSS user community has been very
patient, and it highlights a great benefit of open source software
that even users in industry have continued to rely on
EMBOSS despite the uncertainty about its future. This simply
could not have happened if EMBOSS had been a commercial
package under threat."
EMBOSS provides a powerful package of around 300 applications
for molecular biology and bioinformatics analysis.
Molecular biologists use EMBOSS at all stages of their
research, from planning experiments to analysing results. It
also has an application-programming interface [API] that
enables software developers to write their own EMBOSS applications.
These can readily be strung together, allowing users to
create 'workflows' that automate complex and time-consuming
tasks. EMBOSS has also been used in many commercial software
developments and is included in commercial bioinformatics
systems. Its flexibility has made it an obvious core component
of several data integration and bioinformatics infrastructure
projects, including myGrid and EMBRACE.
The new funding also provides helpdesk support for
EMBOSS's users. "As well as helping researchers with limited
bioinformatics expertise to make the most of EMBOSS, we will
be able to provide better support and documentation to the
estimated 20% of our users who are also software developers",
explains Alan Bleasby. "We will encourage these experts to contribute
their code to the project. In return, we will make their
software widely available through the EMBOSS website and
provide ongoing user support for it. This mechanism will help
to ensure that EMBOSS evolves according to the needs of its
users."
Notes for editors - a brief history of EMBOSS
EMBOSS, an open source suite of tools for the analysis of biological data, has its origins in the late 1980s when Peter Rice, a co-founder
of EMBOSS, was working at EMBL. Encouraged by his colleagues in the lab, he began to write extensions to the GCG package, which
at that time provided its source code to users. His efforts evolved into EGCG [extended GCG] and Rice moved to the Sanger Centre
[now the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute] to continue its development.
However, the changes to the source code licensing of GCG in
1996 put an end to further development of EGCG. recognizing the importance of free source code to the rapid and cost-effective development
of bioinformatics tools, Rice, in collaboration with Alan Bleasby [then at SEQNET, Daresbury, UK] began working on a new
suite of open-source bioinformatics tools - the EMBOSS project - in 1996.
EMBOSS has been funded by: the Wellcome Trust
[1997-2000]; the BBSRC and MRC [2001-2004]; and through two posts at the MRC Rosalind Franklin Centre for Genomic Research
following a merger with BBSRC's SEQNET facility in 1998. After the closure of RFCGR in July 2005, EMBOSS moved to the EMBL-EBI
where it is coordinated by Rice and Bleasby.
Press Contacts
Cath Brooksbank PhD
Scientific Outreach Officer
EMBL-EBI Hinxton, UK
Tel: +44 1223 492 552
Email: cath@ebi.ac.uk
www.ebi.ac.uk
Anna-Lynn Wegener
Press Officer
EMBL
Heidelberg, Germany
Tel: +49 6221 387 8452
Email: wegener@embl.de |
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