European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI)

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is an organisation that forms part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). The EBI is a centre for research and services in bioinformatics. The Institute manages databases of biological data including nucleic acid, protein sequences and macromolecular structures.
EBI is a pioneer of novel and developmental bioinformatics research. They have specialist research groups providing an invaluable resource of biological data and utilities to aid the scientific community in the understanding of genomic and proteomic data.

Research at EBI:
Rolf Apweiler - Joint Team Leader Panda (Protein and nucleotide database) Group
Panda proteins - This part of the Panda group is in charge of data resources related to the protein sequence, domains and families database resources.

Paul Bertone - Group Leader
Bertone Group - The group applies bioinformatics and functional genomics to study early developmental pathways, with a particular focus on lineage commitment and differentiation of mammalian embryonic and neural stem cells.

Ewan Birney - Joint Team Leader Panda (Protein and nucleotide database) Group
Panda nucleotides - This part of the Panda group is in charge of the nucleotide sequence databases at the EBI that include ENSEMBL, EMBL-Bank and ASTD.

Alvis Brazma - Team Leader
Microarray Group - Gene expression data analysis, gene network and function inference from microarray data, functional genomics data integration, analysis and visualisation, biomedical informatics.

Nick Goldman - Group Leader
Goldman Group - Nick Goldman's group studies statistical methods for the analysis of DNA and amino acid sequences, to study evolution and to exploit evolutionary relationships to better understand the function of genome regions.
Wolfgang Huber - Group Leader
Huber Group - The group develops mathematical and statistical methods for the understanding of functional genomics data and the modeling of biological systems.

Sarah Hunter - Team Leader
InterPro Team - This team is responsible for the development and maintenance of the InterPro, Gene Ontology Annotation (GOA) and CluSTr projects. InterPro is an integrated documentation resource for protein families, domains and functional sites, and is used for small and large-scale functional classification of proteins.

Nicolas Le Novère - Group Leader
Computational Neurobiology Group - The interests of the group Computational Neurobiology revolve around signal transduction in neurons, ranging from the molecular structure of membrane proteins involved in neurotransmission to modelling signalling pathways.

Nick Luscombe - Group Leader
Luscombe Group - The group studies biological regulatory systems on a genomic scale: our current focus is to examine how the biology of an organism is shaped by regulation of gene expression. We investigate this at various levels of complexity, from single-celled bacteria and yeast, to mammals by integrating disparate sources of data.

Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann - Group Leader
Rebholz Group - Rebholz group studies extraction of facts from scientific literature, develops new language processing and statistical methods in conjunction with bioinformatics data resources.

Janet Thornton - EBI Director
Thornton Group - The group analyses the three dimensional structural basis of protein function and its evolution. We focus on enzyme catalysis, molecular recognition and drug design and the molecular basis of ageing.


What interests me is the Thornton Group, they are able to find out how biology works at molecular level, and able to research the evolution of enzyme function through structural analysis.
I generally feel that all the research done by all this groups are extremely useful to BioInformatics. From the consolidated resources of proteins, nucleotides, etc. to the prediction of the structural basis of proteins, etc.

For more information about the various groups above, please visit: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/research/