The European Bioinformatics Institute in 2018: tools, infrastructure and training.

ABSTRACT

The European Bioinformatics Institute (https//www.ebi.ac.uk/) archives, curates and analyses life sciences data produced by researchers throughout the world, and makes these data available for re-use globally (https//www.ebi.ac.uk/). Data volumes continue to grow exponentially total raw storage capacity now exceeds 160 petabytes, and we manage these increasing data flows while maintaining the quality of our services. This year we have improved the efficiency of our computational infrastructure and doubled the bandwidth of our connection to the worldwide web. We report two new data resources, the Single Cell Expression Atlas (https//www.ebi.ac.uk/gxa/sc/), which is a component of the Expression Atlas; and the PDBe-Knowledgebase (https//www.ebi.ac.uk/pdbe/pdbe-kb), which collates functional annotations and predictions for structure data in the Protein Data Bank. Additionally, Europe PMC (http//europepmc.org/) has added preprint abstracts to its search results, supplementing results from peer-reviewed publications. EMBL-EBI maintains over 150 analytical bioinformatics tools that complement our data resources. We make these tools available for users through a web interface as well as programmatically using application programming interfaces, whilst ensuring the latest versions are available for our users. Our training team, with support from all of our staff, continued to provide on-site, off-site and web-based training opportunities for thousands of researchers worldwide this year.