The European Nucleotide Archive in 2023.

The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA; https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena) is maintained by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The ENA is one of the three members of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC). It serves the bioinformatics community worldwide via the submission, processing, archiving and dissemination of sequence data. The ENA supports data types ranging from raw reads, through alignments and assemblies to functional annotation. The data is enriched with contextual information relating to samples and experimental configurations. In this article, we describe recent progress and improvements to ENA services. In particular, we focus upon three areas of work in 2023: FAIRness of ENA data, pandemic preparedness and foundational technology. For FAIRness, we have introduced minimal requirements for spatiotemporal annotation, created a metadata-based classification system, incorporated third party metadata curations with archived records, and developed a new rapid visualisation platform, the ENA Notebooks. For foundational enhancements, we have improved the INSDC data exchange and synchronisation pipelines, and invested in site reliability engineering for ENA infrastructure. In order to support genomic surveillance efforts, we have continued to provide ENA services in support of SARS-CoV-2 data mobilisation and have adapted these for broader pathogen surveillance efforts.

MGnify: the microbiome sequence data analysis resource in 2023.

The MGnify platform (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/metagenomics) facilitates the assembly, analysis and archiving of microbiome-derived nucleic acid sequences. The platform provides access to taxonomic assignments and functional annotations for nearly half a million analyses covering metabarcoding, metatranscriptomic, and metagenomic datasets, which are derived from a wide range of different environments. Over the past 3 years, MGnify has not only grown in terms of the number of datasets contained but also increased the breadth of analyses provided, such as the analysis of long-read sequences. The MGnify protein database now exceeds 2.4 billion non-redundant sequences predicted from metagenomic assemblies. This collection is now organised into a relational database making it possible to understand the genomic context of the protein through navigation back to the source assembly and sample metadata, marking a major improvement. To extend beyond the functional annotations already provided in MGnify, we have applied deep learning-based annotation methods. The technology underlying MGnify's Application Programming Interface (API) and website has been upgraded, and we have enabled the ability to perform downstream analysis of the MGnify data through the introduction of a coupled Jupyter Lab environment.

The European Nucleotide Archive in 2022.

The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA; https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena), maintained by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), offers those producing data an open and supported platform for the management, archiving, publication, and dissemination of data; and to the scientific community as a whole, it offers a globally comprehensive data set through a host of data discovery and retrieval tools. Here, we describe recent updates to the ENA's submission and retrieval services as well as focused efforts to improve connectivity, reusability, and interoperability of ENA data and metadata.

The European Nucleotide Archive in 2021.

The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA, https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena), maintained at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) provides freely accessible services, both for deposition of, and access to, open nucleotide sequencing data. Open scientific data are of paramount importance to the scientific community and contribute daily to the acceleration of scientific advance. Here, we outline the major updates to ENA's services and infrastructure that have been delivered over the past year.

The international nucleotide sequence database collaboration.

The International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC; http://www.insdc.org/) has been the core infrastructure for collecting and providing nucleotide sequence data and metadata for >30 years. Three partner organizations, the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) at the National Institute of Genetics in Mishima, Japan; the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK; and GenBank at National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA have been collaboratively maintaining the INSDC for the benefit of not only science but all types of community worldwide.

The European Bioinformatics Institute: empowering cooperation in response to a global health crisis.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI; https://www.ebi.ac.uk/) provides freely available data and bioinformatics services to the scientific community, alongside its research activity and training provision. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront a need for the scientific community to work even more cooperatively to effectively tackle a global health crisis. EMBL-EBI has been able to build on its position to contribute to the fight against COVID-19 in a number of ways. Firstly, EMBL-EBI has used its infrastructure, expertise and network of international collaborations to help build the European COVID-19 Data Platform (https://www.covid19dataportal.org/), which brings together COVID-19 biomolecular data and connects it to researchers, clinicians and public health professionals. By September 2020, the COVID-19 Data Platform has integrated in excess of 170 000 COVID-19 biomolecular data and literature records, collected through a number of EMBL-EBI resources. Secondly, EMBL-EBI has strived to continue its support of the life science communities through the crisis, with updated Training provision and improved service provision throughout its resources. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of EMBL-EBI's core principles, including international cooperation, resource sharing and central data brokering, and has further empowered scientific cooperation.

The European Nucleotide Archive in 2020.

The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA; https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena), provided by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), has for almost forty years continued in its mission to freely archive and present the world's public sequencing data for the benefit of the entire scientific community and for the acceleration of the global research effort. Here we highlight the major developments to ENA services and content in 2020, focussing in particular on the recently released updated ENA browser, modernisation of our release process and our data coordination collaborations with specific research communities.

The COVID-19 Data Portal: accelerating SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 research through rapid open access data sharing.

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic will be remembered as one of the defining events of the 21st century. The rapid global outbreak has had significant impacts on human society and is already responsible for millions of deaths. Understanding and tackling the impact of the virus has required a worldwide mobilisation and coordination of scientific research. The COVID-19 Data Portal (https://www.covid19dataportal.org/) was first released as part of the European COVID-19 Data Platform, on April 20th 2020 to facilitate rapid and open data sharing and analysis, to accelerate global SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 research. The COVID-19 Data Portal has fortnightly feature releases to continue to add new data types, search options, visualisations and improvements based on user feedback and research. The open datasets and intuitive suite of search, identification and download services, represent a truly FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) resource that enables researchers to easily identify and quickly obtain the key datasets needed for their COVID-19 research.

The European Bioinformatics Institute in 2020: building a global infrastructure of interconnected data resources for the life sciences.

Data resources at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI, https://www.ebi.ac.uk/) archive, organize and provide added-value analysis of research data produced around the world. This year's update for EMBL-EBI focuses on data exchanges among resources, both within the institute and with a wider global infrastructure. Within EMBL-EBI, data resources exchange data through a rich network of data flows mediated by automated systems. This network ensures that users are served with as much information as possible from any search and any starting point within EMBL-EBI's websites. EMBL-EBI data resources also exchange data with hundreds of other data resources worldwide and collectively are a key component of a global infrastructure of interconnected life sciences data resources. We also describe the BioImage Archive, a deposition database for raw images derived from primary research that will supply data for future knowledgebases that will add value through curation of primary image data. We also report a new release of the PRIDE database with an improved technical infrastructure, a new API, a new webpage, and improved data exchange with UniProt and Expression Atlas. Training is a core mission of EMBL-EBI and in 2018 our training team served more users, both in-person and through web-based programmes, than ever before.

MGnify: the microbiome analysis resource in 2020.

MGnify (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/metagenomics) provides a free to use platform for the assembly, analysis and archiving of microbiome data derived from sequencing microbial populations that are present in particular environments. Over the past 2 years, MGnify (formerly EBI Metagenomics) has more than doubled the number of publicly available analysed datasets held within the resource. Recently, an updated approach to data analysis has been unveiled (version 5.0), replacing the previous single pipeline with multiple analysis pipelines that are tailored according to the input data, and that are formally described using the Common Workflow Language, enabling greater provenance, reusability, and reproducibility. MGnify's new analysis pipelines offer additional approaches for taxonomic assertions based on ribosomal internal transcribed spacer regions (ITS1/2) and expanded protein functional annotations. Biochemical pathways and systems predictions have also been added for assembled contigs. MGnify's growing focus on the assembly of metagenomic data has also seen the number of datasets it has assembled and analysed increase six-fold. The non-redundant protein database constructed from the proteins encoded by these assemblies now exceeds 1 billion sequences. Meanwhile, a newly developed contig viewer provides fine-grained visualisation of the assembled contigs and their enriched annotations.

The European Nucleotide Archive in 2019.

The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA, https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena) at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute provides open and freely available data deposition and access services across the spectrum of nucleotide sequence data types. Making the world's public sequencing datasets available to the scientific community, the ENA represents a globally comprehensive nucleotide sequence resource. Here, we outline ENA services and content in 2019 and provide an insight into selected key areas of development in this period.

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

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.

The European Nucleotide Archive in 2018.

The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA; https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena), provided from EMBL-EBI, has for more than three decades been responsible for archiving the world's public sequencing data and presenting this important resource to the scientific community to support and accelerate the global research effort. Here, we outline ENA services and content in 2018 and provide an overview of a selection of focus areas of development work: extending data coordination services around ENA, sequence submissions through template expansion, early pre-submission validation tools and our move towards a new browser and retrieval infrastructure.

The international nucleotide sequence database collaboration.

For more than 30 years, the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC; http://www.insdc.org/) has been committed to capturing, preserving and providing access to comprehensive public domain nucleotide sequence and associated metadata which enables discovery in biomedicine, biodiversity and biological sciences. Since 1987, the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ) at the National Institute for Genetics in Mishima, Japan; the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK; and GenBank at National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA have worked collaboratively to enable access to nucleotide sequence data in standardized formats for the worldwide scientific community. In this article, we reiterate the principles of the INSDC collaboration and briefly summarize the trends of the archival content.

The European Bioinformatics Institute in 2017: data coordination and integration.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) supports life-science research throughout the world by providing open data, open-source software and analytical tools, and technical infrastructure (https://www.ebi.ac.uk). We accommodate an increasingly diverse range of data types and integrate them, so that biologists in all disciplines can explore life in ever-increasing detail. We maintain over 40 data resources, many of which are run collaboratively with partners in 16 countries (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/services). Submissions continue to increase exponentially: our data storage has doubled in less than two years to 120 petabytes. Recent advances in cellular imaging and single-cell sequencing techniques are generating a vast amount of high-dimensional data, bringing to light new cell types and new perspectives on anatomy. Accordingly, one of our main focus areas is integrating high-quality information from bioimaging, biobanking and other types of molecular data. This is reflected in our deep involvement in Open Targets, stewarding of plant phenotyping standards (MIAPPE) and partnership in the Human Cell Atlas data coordination platform, as well as the 2017 launch of the Omics Discovery Index. This update gives a birds-eye view of EMBL-EBI's approach to data integration and service development as genomics begins to enter the clinic.

EBI Metagenomics in 2017: enriching the analysis of microbial communities, from sequence reads to assemblies.

EBI metagenomics (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/metagenomics) provides a free to use platform for the analysis and archiving of sequence data derived from the microbial populations found in a particular environment. Over the past two years, EBI metagenomics has increased the number of datasets analysed 10-fold. In addition to increased throughput, the underlying analysis pipeline has been overhauled to include both new or updated tools and reference databases. Of particular note is a new workflow for taxonomic assignments that has been extended to include assignments based on both the large and small subunit RNA marker genes and to encompass all cellular micro-organisms. We also describe the addition of metagenomic assembly as a new analysis service. Our pilot studies have produced over 2400 assemblies from datasets in the public domain. From these assemblies, we have produced a searchable, non-redundant protein database of over 50 million sequences. To provide improved access to the data stored within the resource, we have developed a programmatic interface that provides access to the analysis results and associated sample metadata. Finally, we have integrated the results of a series of statistical analyses that provide estimations of diversity and sample comparisons.

The European Nucleotide Archive in 2017.

For 35 years the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA; https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena) has been responsible for making the world's public sequencing data available to the scientific community. Advances in sequencing technology have driven exponential growth in the volume of data to be processed and stored and a substantial broadening of the user community. Here, we outline ENA services and content in 2017 and provide insight into a selection of current key areas of development in ENA driven by challenges arising from the above growth.

European Nucleotide Archive in 2016.

The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA; http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena) offers a rich platform for data sharing, publishing and archiving and a globally comprehensive data set for onward use by the scientific community. With a broad scope spanning raw sequencing reads, genome assemblies and functional annotation, the resource provides extensive data submission, search and download facilities across web and programmatic interfaces. Here, we outline ENA content and major access modalities, highlight major developments in 2016 and outline a number of examples of data reuse from ENA.

RNAcentral: a comprehensive database of non-coding RNA sequences.

RNAcentral is a database of non-coding RNA (ncRNA) sequences that aggregates data from specialised ncRNA resources and provides a single entry point for accessing ncRNA sequences of all ncRNA types from all organisms. Since its launch in 2014, RNAcentral has integrated twelve new resources, taking the total number of collaborating database to 22, and began importing new types of data, such as modified nucleotides from MODOMICS and PDB. We created new species-specific identifiers that refer to unique RNA sequences within a context of single species. The website has been subject to continuous improvements focusing on text and sequence similarity searches as well as genome browsing functionality. All RNAcentral data is provided for free and is available for browsing, bulk downloads, and programmatic access at http://rnacentral.org/.

The International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration.

The International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC; http://www.insdc.org) comprises three global partners committed to capturing, preserving and providing comprehensive public-domain nucleotide sequence information. The INSDC establishes standards, formats and protocols for data and metadata to make it easier for individuals and organisations to submit their nucleotide data reliably to public archives. This work enables the continuous, global exchange of information about living things. Here we present an update of the INSDC in 2015, including data growth and diversification, new standards and requirements by publishers for authors to submit their data to the public archives. The INSDC serves as a model for data sharing in the life sciences.