An Introduction to the European Bioinformatics Institute

The European Bioinformatics Institute exists to deliver freely available data and to provide bioinformatics services to all facets of the scientific community in ways that promote scientific progress and to offer advanced bioinformatics training to scientists at all levels, from PhD students to independent investigators. The EBI provides a pipeline of tools and services to support the assembly and annotation of new genomes, in addition to facilitating the deposition of new knowledge into the public domain at the time of publication.

Through talks and demonstrations, this workshop will introduce the users to the resources available at the EBI and finally, to Train Online (www.ebi.ac.uk/training/online/), a free, web-based learning resource for life scientists. Train Online helps the research community makes the most of the huge amount of biological data that EMBL-EBI makes publicly available. Using a combination of tutorials, guided examples, exercises and quizzes, Train Online guides the user towards becoming a confident user of open-access data resources. This training portal is there for users to learn in their own time anywhere in the world. Workshop attendees do not need previous experience in bioinformatics and will be encouraged to use Train Online to learn how best to use these invaluable resources.