European Bioinformatics Institute Drives Genomics Research With GÃ‰ANT

High-speed GÉANT and JANET research networks enable
global collaboration on 1000 Genomes Project

Cambridge, UK, June 9 2011 – The European
Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics
Institute (EMBL-EBI), which hosts the world’s largest public
collection of molecular biology databases, is using the
pan-European GÉANT research network and JANET, the UK
research network, to help biologists share vital data across the
globe.

GÉANT logo

EMBL-EBI relies on the fast, secure transmission of large
amounts of biological data between its campus in rural
Cambridgeshire and its many partners around the world. The EMBL-EBI
website receives more than 3.5 million information requests every
day, and over 80 terabytes of data is transmitted by EMBL-EBI over
the high-speed, high-bandwidth JANET and GÉANT networks
every month. JANET transports EMBL-EBI information within the UK;
GÉANT then communicates it to national networks around
Europe, to the US via links with Internet2 and to China via links
with CERNET.

EMBL-EBI is a key partner in many global initiatives. One of these,
the 1000 Genomes Project, is sequencing the genomes of 2500 people
around the world and studying the minute differences that make
people unique. The knowledge generated in this project is being
used to advance our understanding of human health by explaining
genetic susceptibility to disease or responses to particular drugs,
for example. Chaired by Richard Durbin at the Wellcome Trust Sanger
Institute in the UK and David Altshuler at the Broad Institute in
the US, the Project includes participants from Europe, the Americas
and Asia. Researchers at EMBL-EBI are responsible for creating a
strategy to characterise these variations, and for creating the
bioinformatics infrastructure to support the massive movement of
these data.

The pilot phase of the 1000 Genomes Project, completed in 2010,
created 4.9 terabases of DNA sequence and uncovered 8 million
variations that had never been seen before. By its completion in
2012, the project is expected to produce between 60 and 80
terabases of data – the equivalent of around 250,000
gigabytes of data.

Information currently flows to EMBL-EBI from seven sequencing
centres in China, Germany, the UK and the US; it is then mirrored
to the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in the US
and supplied to 40 groups across the world for initial analysis.
Final datasets are then accessed by another 100 groups of
researchers.

“Data generated by biological experiments is doubling
every five months, driven by leading-edge initiatives such as the
1000 Genomes Project. Our mission at EMBL-EBI is to make the
results of these international collaborations freely available to
the scientific community wherever they are located,” said Dr
Paul Flicek, Head of Vertebrate Genomics at EMBL-EBI. “To do
this we need an infrastructure that is robust, flexible and high
performance, linking us to our partners across the globe. Our close
working relationship with the JANET and GÉANT networks
delivers the speed and capacity that we need, giving us confidence
and allowing us to focus on sharing data to push forward scientific
progress.”

By 2020, biological data generation is expected to reach
thousands of times the current rate. This growth far exceeds
predicted increases in storage capacity, meaning current models of
centralised data resources will not be able to cope. ELIXIR, an
ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) project
of global significance, aims to create a stable infrastructure for
biological data in Europe that distributes information across
multiple locations while making it available to researchers
wherever they are. ELIXIR is co-ordinated by EMBL-EBI and is
currently entering its construction phase. Once created, ELIXIR
will rely on high-speed networks such as GÉANT, JANET and
other national research networks across Europe to deliver data in
real time to scientists wherever they may be.

“Mapping the DNA of thousands of organisms, including the
human genome, is leading to breakthroughs in medical research that
can potentially deliver better health outcomes for people across
the world,” said Matthew Scott, General Manager of DANTE, the
organisation which on behalf of Europe’s National Research
and Education Networks (NRENs) has built and operates the
GÉANT network. “The European Bioinformatics Institute
is leading the way by making these complex, large datasets freely
available to international researchers. EMBL-EBI’s use of
GÉANT and JANET is at the heart of its mission to create and
share information by providing direct access to its vast range of
biological data resources and tools. With research now relying on
fast access to distributed data resources, high speed, robust
networks are at the heart of pushing back the frontiers of
scientific knowledge.”

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About the European Bioinformatics Institute

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is part of the
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and is located on the
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge, UK. The EBI
grew out of EMBL’s pioneering work in providing public biological
databases to the research community. It hosts some of the
world’s most important collections of biological data,
including DNA sequences (EMBL-Bank), protein sequences (UniProt),
animal genomes (Ensembl), three-dimensional structures (the Protein
Data Bank in Europe), data from gene expression experiments
(ArrayExpress), protein-protein interactions (IntAct) and pathway
information (Reactome). EMBL-EBI hosts several research groups and
its scientists continually develop new analytic tools for the life
science community. It is coordinating ELIXIR, a pan-European
research infrastructure for biological information. http://www.ebi.ac.uk/

About GÉANT

GÉANT is the high speed European communication
network dedicated to research and education. In combination with
its NREN partners, GÉANT creates a secure, high speed
research infrastructure that serves 40 million researchers in over
8,000 institutions across 40 European countries. Operating at
speeds of up to 40 Gbps, GÉANT is the world’s largest
and most advanced multi-gigabit network dedicated to research and
education. Building on the success of its predecessors,
GÉANT has been created around the needs of users, providing
flexible, end to end services that transform the way that
researchers collaborate. GÉANT is at the heart of
global research networking through wide ranging connections with
other world regions, underpinning vital projects that bridge the
digital divide and benefit society as a whole.

Co-funded by the European Commission under the EU’s 7th
Research and Development Framework Programme, GÉANT is the
e-Infrastructure at the heart of the EU’s European Research
Area and contributes to the development of emerging internet
technologies. The project partners are 32 European National
Research and Education Networks (NRENs), TERENA and DANTE.
GÉANT is operated by DANTE on behalf of Europe’s
NRENs. For more information, visit http://www.geant.net

About DANTE

DANTE is a non-profit organisation, coordinator of
large-scale projects co-funded by the European Commission, and
working in partnership with European National Research and
Education Networks (NRENs) to plan, build and operate advanced
networks for research and education. Established in 1993, DANTE has
been fundamental to the success of pan-European research and
education networking. DANTE has built and operates GÉANT,
which provides the data communications infrastructure essential to
the success of many research projects in Europe. DANTE is involved
in worldwide initiatives to interconnect countries in the other
regions to one another and to GÉANT. DANTE currently manages
projects focussed on the Mediterranean, Asia-Pacific and central
Asia regions through the EUMEDCONNECT, TEIN and CAREN projects
respectively. For more information, visit www.dante.net.

About ELIXIR

The purpose of ELIXIR is to develop the plan for a
sustainable infrastructure for biological information in Europe.
This plan focuses on generating stable funding for Europe’s
most important publicly accessible databases of molecular
biological information, and the development of a compute
infrastructure that can cope with the biological data deluge.
ELIXIR is one of 44 research infrastructures recommended by the
European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI, http://cordis.europa.eu/esfri/)
as being of key strategic importance to Europe’s future.
ELIXIR holds a special place among these because it will provide
infrastructure for the other biological, medical and environmental
research infrastructures being developed. ELIXIR will provide: data
resources; bio-compute centres; an infrastructure for integration
of biological data, software tools and services throughout and
beyond Europe; support for other European infrastructures in
biomedical and environmental research; and services for the
research community, including training and standards development.
This will enable ELIXIR’s users to meet the European Grand
Challenges, which are almost all biological, namely: healthcare for
an aging population, a sustainable food supply, competitive
pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries and protection of the
environment. To date, Finland, Denmark, Spain, Sweden and the UK
have committed funds to ELIXIR and the project is actively seeking
the support of other nations. www.elixir-europe.org