Janet Thornton, Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute

http://www.research-europe.com/index.php/2011/08/janet-thornton-director-of-the-european-bioinformatics-institute/

EMBRACE is working towards integrating major databases and software tools in bioinformatics, using existing methods and emerging Grid service technologies, driven by an expanding set of test problems representing key issues for bioinformatics service providers and end-user biologists.

BioSapiens supported a large-scale, concerted effort to annotate genome data by laboratories distributed around Europe, using both informatics tools and input from experimentalists. It developed new methods for functional analysis in silico and provided servers and clients for annotating genomes and proteomes with a range of different types of biological data. These methods were applied to specific challenges, including annotating the human genome.

ENFIN aims to provide Europe-wide integration of computational approaches to systems biology. It has developed a suite of analysis tools for systems biologists and platforms to integrate these tools. Perhaps most importantly, all three networks have contributed significantly towards building a European Research area for bioinformatics, especially by being a major influence in the development of ELIXIR.