The Service Programme's activities centre round the curation and distribution of various databases and the tools to exploit those databases. This involves keeping abreast with the biological research, and tracking developing information technology with a view to exploiting it in the biological arena. The Research Programme, which was in its start-up phase in 1995, carries out basic research in information intensive aspects of theoretical biology. Current themes include protein structure and genome exploration. With the databases doubling every year, and a new sequence coming in once a minute, a major achievement of 1995 was simply keeping the operations running smoothly through the transition into the new building.
Rapid change is the rule in the field of molecular biology.
Rather than simply keeping up with new developments, the EBI's goal is to help set the pace at the forefront of bioinformatics. This is the major reason for the Outstations integration of a basic research programme at the EBI, but it also means maintaining close working relationships with other leaders in the field. One new initiative, the Radiation Hybrid Database, for example, was planned and put into effect with a consortium of international collaborators. Progress in the field has also been accompanied by a tremendous overall growth of information during the last year, both in terms of volume and sources. This catalysed a notable EBI effort to redesign computer access systems so that the many and various databases are now interfaced logically and accessed quickly and accurately via the World Wide Web and other sources.