European biologists have been given a funding lifeline to help them cope with the ever increasing torrent of data they generate. Without it, they鈥檇 have to rely on the United States for the computer programmes necessary to analyse their data.
The European Commission announced on Wednesday that it has pledged nearly 20 million Euros over three years to the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge along with 25 other European collaborators.
One key aim is to create standards. If everyone describes their data in the same way, then different databases will all be able to understand each other.
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It鈥檚 possible that making everyone speak in the same terms might stifle creativity, and new ways of looking at things might be lost. But Graham Cameron, joint-head of the EBI says that for the moment, it鈥檚 the best way to get useful knowledge out of all the bits of information around.
鈥淵ou cannot become a slave to data structures,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut building a database is always a compromise between exhaustiveness and simplicity. If you build a database to deal with every exhaustive case then you complicate things for everyone. It鈥檚 one of the great judgement calls of bioinformatics.鈥�
Information is pouring out of biological research labs at an astonishing rate. The DNA sequence database maintained by the EBI currently holds more than 12.5 billion bases from 50,000 species, with a new sequence is being added every few seconds.
But raw code is just the start and scientists want to understand which genes are switched on when, which proteins they are making, and what those proteins are doing. Humans may have as few as 30,000 genes, but these can make one million different protein molecules.
And although each person has just one genome, the collection of proteins present in their cells (or 鈥減roteome鈥�) is different in each part of the body, and changes all the time. 鈥淚f you have a hangover after a big party, you鈥檒l have a completely different proteome to the day before,鈥� says Rolf Apweiler of the EBI.
The EBI hope to use the money to help researchers in two ways. The first is to provide public databases where scientists all over the world can deposit their data, and have access to each other鈥檚 results.
This already happens for gene and protein sequences, but the EBI say they will now be able to create databases for DNA chip results, and for data about interactions between different proteins.
The second aim is to make the databases for all the different kinds of information compatible. 快猫短视频s in labs will then be able to access all possible kinds of information about a gene or protein that they are interested in. 鈥淲e鈥檒l be a one stop shop,鈥� says Cameron.
The 20 million euros is the most money the EC has ever given to bioinformatics. But this year alone, the budget of the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) will be 48 million Euros.
Fotis Kafatos, Director-General of European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, says Europe will still be able to give the Americans a run for their money. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not just about resources, it鈥檚 about brain power too,鈥� he says.
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