Big data in biology leads to discoveries that can benefit humankind: this is what EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) believe, and what they have proven to be true over two decades since its founding at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK.
Part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an intergovernmental research organisation funded by over 20 member states, EMBL-EBI’s data spans genomics, proteins, small molecules, ontologies and more.
As a champion of open data in the life sciences, EMBL-EBI was a natural partner for DeepMind to host the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, providing freely available access to protein structure predictions to scientists globally.
After launching in 2021 with around 365,000 structure predictions, the database now contains more than 200m predictions, covering nearly all catalogued proteins known to science and increasing our understanding of biology by orders of magnitude.
Links and further reading:
- Access the AlphaFold DB
- Read EMBL-EBI’s white paper on the potential impacts of AlphaFold DB
- Read Prof Dame Janet Thornton’s blog post on the importance of the protein folding problem
