The European Bioinformatics Institute's data resources: towards systems biology.
Genomic and post-genomic biological research has provided fine-grain insights into the molecular processes of life, but also threatens to drown biomedical researchers in data. Moreover, as new high-throughput technologies are developed, the types of data that are gathered en masse are diversifying. The need to collect, store and curate all this information in ways that allow its efficient retrieval and exploitation is greater than ever. The European Bioinformatics Institute's (EBI's) databases and tools have evolved to meet the changing needs of molecular biologists: since we last wrote about our services in the 2003 issue of Nucleic Acids Research, we have launched new databases covering protein-protein interactions (IntAct), pathways (Reactome) and small molecules (ChEBI). Our existing core databases have continued to evolve to meet the changing needs of biomedical researchers, and we have developed new data-access tools that help biologists to move intuitively through the different data types, thereby helping them to put the parts together to understand biology at the systems level. The EBI's data resources are all available on our website at http://www.ebi.ac.uk.
Brooksbank
Catherine
C
EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK. cath@ebi.ac.uk
Cameron
Graham
G
Thornton
Janet
J
D019295:Computational Biology; D016208:Databases, Factual; D030561:Databases, Nucleic Acid; D030562:Databases, Protein; D005060:Europe; D020869:Gene Expression Profiling; D005796:Genes; D016678:Genome; D006801:Humans; D008958:Models, Molecular; D025941:Protein Interaction Mapping; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry; D040901:Proteomics; D015398:Signal Transduction; D018511:Systems Integration; D014158:Transcription, Genetic
D011506:Proteins