BRAEMBL

BRAEMBL, pronounced "bramble",^[1] is a research support facility^[2] for bioinformatics services at The University of Queensland. The acronym "BRAEMBL" stands for Bioinformatics Resource Australia - EMBL.

Many of BRAEMBL's services are provided to compensate for the disadvantages of Australia's distance to the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton, UK. The distance leads to long delay paths over TCP network connections which make data transfers slow despite their high bandwidth.^[3]

This can be a problem for Australian researchers, because data volumes in life sciences can be large,^[4][5] so slow download speeds from the EBI can make their data hard to access. The distance also means longer waiting times for support requests because of the different time zones.

BRAEMBL alleviates this by providing mirrors of software from the EBI and local support to Australian researchers for EBI services.

BRAEMBL also hosts software from Australian researchers^[6][7][8] and in some cases, aids the development of analysis tools for them.

Funding

BRAEMBL is funded by the Australian government.^[9]

Resources

• Web based analysis tools such as BLAST, InterProScan and MEME Suite, with RESTful interfaces for programmatic remote access,
• A service for submission of sequencing data ,
• A mirror of publicly available EBI databases,
• A collection of bioinformatics software on the high performance compute cluster "barrine" and
• Support for users of the cluster.

References

1. ↑ "QFAB Bioinformatics". www.qfab.org. Retrieved 10 September 2014. 
2. ↑ "Research support facilities at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience". www.imb.uq.edu.au. Retrieved 9 September 2014. 
3. ↑ "TCP Extensions for Long-Delay Paths". Internet Engineering Task Force. Retrieved 11 September 2014. 
4. ↑ "The Sequence Read Archive: explosive growth of sequencing data.". US National Library of Medicine. Retrieved 10 September 2014. 
5. ↑ "Petabyte-scale innovations at the European Nucleotide Archive". nar.oxfordjournals.org. Retrieved 9 September 2014. 
6. ↑ "RMaNI: Regulatory Module Network Inference framework". BMC Bioinformatics. Retrieved 11 September 2014. 
7. ↑ "GT-Scan: Identifying unique genomic targets". Bioinformatics. Retrieved 11 September 2014. 
8. ↑ "INsPeCT: INtegrative Platform for Cancer Transcriptomics". Bioinformatics. Retrieved 11 September 2014. 
9. ↑ "BRAEMBL Annual Report 2014". braembl.org.au. Retrieved 9 September 2014.