The EBI is a non-profit research and service organisation, building and making available databases and information services relevant to biological research, and carrying out research in computational molecular biology. The EBI Research Programme has fundamental and applied research activities at the leading edge of computational molecular biology. These include molecular evolution, genome comparison, parallel computing in molecular biology, analysis of biomolecular sequences and 3D structures, prediction of genes, their function and structure from sequence information and navigation tools for linking databases. Bioinformatics and IT in general are of increasing importance to industry, especially in the pharmaceutical field.
Special emphasis is given to the promotion of existing standards, and the development of new ones.
The Affiliates initiative is targeted at small to medium enterprises in the bioinformatics and biotechnology industry. It is specifically designed to help affiliate companies recognise new technologies and trends in bioinformatics. In this context, the EBI is concerned with stimulating the uptake of HPCN by SMEs in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and agricultural industry.