EMBnet (European Molecular Biology network)[1] is an international network that aims to enhance bioinformatics services by bringing together bioinformatics service providers. On 2011 EMBnet has 37 nodes spread over 32 countries. The nodes include bioinformatics related university departments, research institutes and national service providers.
The main task of most EMBnet nodes is to provide their national scientific community with access to bioinformatics databanks, specialised software and sufficient computing resources. EMBnet is also working in the fields of bioinformatics training and software development. Examples of software created by EMBnet members are: EMBOSS, wEMBOSS [1], UTOPIA.
EMBnet represents a wide user group and works closely together with the database producers such as EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (Swiss-Prot), the Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences (MIPS), in order to provide a uniform coverage of services throughout Europe. EMBnet is registered in the Netherlands as a public foundation (Stichting).
Since its creation in 1988, EMBnet has evolved from an informal network of individuals in charge of maintaining biological databases into the only organization worldwide bringing bioinformatics professionals to work together to serve the expanding fields of genetics and molecular biology. Although composed predominantly of academic nodes, EMBnet gains an important added dimension from its industrial members. The success of EMBnet is attracting increasing numbers of organizations outside Europe to join. EMBnet has a tried-and-tested infrastructure to organise training courses, give technical help and help its members effectively interact and respond to the rapidly changing needs of biological research in a way no single institute is able to do. In 2005 the organization created additional types of node to allow more than one member per country. The new category denomination is "associated node".
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EMBnet is governed by the Annual EMBnet Meeting (AGM), and is coordinated by an Executive Board that oversees the activities of three project committees:
EMBnet had the first gopher and World Wide Web servers in biology (CSC BioBox)
EMBnet was the first to come up with solutions for daily database updates using Internet (NDT), distributed computing (HASSLE) and efficient database browsing and linking (Sequence Retrieval System, SRS).
The Ping project was created as a mean to obtain continuous information about network efficiency across the whole of Europe.
EMBnet is committed to bringing the latest software algorithms to the user free of charge (Extended GCG or EGCG[2]) and continues to develop state of the art public software (EMBOSS).
EMBER: a European Multimedia Bioinformatics Educational Resource. EMBER was an European Union (EU) funded project aiming to develop a suite of multimedia bioinformatics educational tools [3] . EMBER comprises a self-contained, interactive Web tutorial in bioinformatics, & the equivalent stand-alone course on CD-ROM.
The EMBnet community was involved in the creation of the peer reviewed journal Briefings in Bioinformatics (BiB). BiB was also supported by an educational grant from EMBnet.
Starting from 1994 and up to 2009 EMBnet has published the EMBnet.news. The EMBnet.news primary goal was to bring information and report on the latest news and developments from the network to the user community. Starting from 2010 the EMBnet.news was converted in the EMBnet.journal, an Open Access peer reviewed journal, publishing peer-reviewed primary research articles, reviews, technical notes, commentary, reportage, user-guides, training information and news in Bioinformatics.