The 20th anniversary of EMBnet: 20 years of bioinformatics for the Life Sciences community

Abstract

The EMBnet Conference 2008, focusing on 'Leading Applications and Technologies in Bioinformatics', was organized by the European Molecular Biology network (EMBnet) to celebrate its 20 th anniversary. Since its foundation in 1988, EMBnet has been working to promote collaborative development of bioinformatics services and tools to serve the European community of molecular biology laboratories. This conference was the first meeting organized by the network that was open to the international scientific community outside EMBnet. The conference covered a broad range of research topics in bioinformatics with a main focus on new achievements and trends in emerging technologies supporting genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics analyses such as high-throughput sequencing and data managing, text and data-mining, ontologies and Grid technologies. Papers selected for publication, in this supplement to BMC Bioinformatics, cover a broad range of the topics treated, providing also an overview of the main bioinformatics research fields that the EMBnet community is involved in. EMBnet history, mission and activitiesEMBnet was established in 1988 as an initiative of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) [1]. At that time, high-speed data communication across Europe as well as bioinformatics were in their infancy. The EMBL was accumulating an ever-growing quantity of sequence data and both the molecular biology and the biotechnology research communities needed to have an easy and fast access to those data. Accessing a remote computer using an ordinary command-line oriented terminal was not enough. The solution for eliminating communication delays could only be found in a distribution of data and

Characterization of the Deleted in Autism 1 Protein Family: Implications for Studying Cognitive Disorders

“…Boxshade (version 3.21), available at EMBnet [136]–[137], was used to format some amino acid alignments. The ExPASy Compute pI/MW tool was used to calculate theoretical molecular weights and isoelectric points [138].…”

“…Protein sequence alignments were generated with CLUSTALW (version 1.8) [47] at NPS@ [135] with manual alignment of some positions. Boxshade (version 3.21), available at EMBnet [136] – [137] , was used to format some amino acid alignments. The ExPASy Compute pI/MW tool was used to calculate theoretical molecular weights and isoelectric points [138] .…”

The EMBnet International Conference 2020: Bioinformatics Approaches to Precision Research

“…Since then, each year, the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Network has always been accompanied by an open conference, a workshop or a school on cutting-edge challenges in the bioinformatics field and usually organised in collaboration with other network organisations or societies. With the Iberoamerican Society for Bioinformatics (SoIBio) 2 , EMBnet organised a big conference in Cancun, Mexico, in 2009 (Lopez-Bojorquez et al, 2010) and in 2018 in Viña del Mar (Chile), celebrating the 30th anniversary of EMBnet, also with the collaboration of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) 3 . Other partners were the project EMBRACE (Gisel and Bongcam-Rudloff, 2010), STATEGRA 4 , AllBio 5 , the COST Action SeqAhed (Attwood et al, 2011), the COST Action CHARME (CA15110) and NETTAB 6 , the Network Tools and Applications in Biology workshops series in Bioinformatics.…”

KaruBioNet: a network and discussion group for a better collaboration and structuring of bioinformatics in Guadeloupe (French West Indies)

“…As Karukera (‘the island of beautiful waters’) is the Native American name of Guadeloupe, we decided to create in January 2019 the Karukera Bioinformatics Network: KaruBioNet. However, we cannot omit lessons learnt from other renowned networks before establishing KaruBioNet such as EMBnet and H3ABioNet ( D’Elia et al , 2009 ; Mulder et al , 2016 ).…”