Bioinformatics capability is crucial to all life science research.  To exploit the tools of bioinformatics, scientists need services that bring together data, software, hardware and expertise.  As part of EMBL Australia’s mandate to further Australian interests in global research, the BRAEMBL Data Integration Team has been established to assist Australian scientists integrate their molecular data into the global data infrastructure and to have better access to data, tools and services developed outside Australia.

 The European Bioinformatics Institute's (EBI) data resources, in particular the data archives, face a number of problems when serving Australian users that relate to geographical separation (especially in network latency and challenging time zones). Beyond an interest in serving Australian scientists, the archives require the inclusion of Australian data to build and maintain comprehensive coverage across diverse research fields.

The Data Integration Team can assist Australian researchers with handling and collating experimental metadata; submission of array and NGS data to public repositories (including reads, assemblies and annotations); downstream analyses including the EBI Metagenomics Pipeline and the Ensembl Genebuild pipeline; batch submission of large datasets; and other EBI services as required. The aim of the BRAEMBL Data Integration team is to give researchers more time to focus on research, have data submitted to the highest community standards and in so doing, increase utility of these data to the international research community.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is one of very few major centres in the world that provides data and services to support bioinformatics.  The EBI is a part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and, with Australia’s membership of EMBL and the creation of EMBL Australia, a natural collaborator in providing for the bioinformatics needs of Australia.