Funding at the EBI

EBI Funding (€)

The EMBL-EBI attracted over €43.2 million in internal and external funding for 2008. The global importance of our work is reflected in the fact that we attracted 55% of our funds from external sources, including some beyond Europe. As part of EMBL, the largest part of our funding (generally 40-50%) comes from the governments of EMBL’s member states. Other major funders include the European Commission, Wellcome Trust, US National Institutes of Health, UK research councils and our industry partners. We thank all our funders for allowing us to continue and expand our work.

EMBL - Our parent organization provides approximately 50% of our funds. The European Molecular Biology Laboratory provides funding for all our research groups, as well as our systems, external services, outreach and training, database applications, administration and other support. EMBL also provides support for our core databases.

Commission of the European Union - Funds ~20% of our activities, through several different contracts including:

• BioSapiens aims to address the current fragmentation of European bioinformatics by creating a virtual research institute for genome annotation and by organizing a European school for training in genome annotation.
  
  
• The mission of ELIXIR is to construct and operate a sustainable infrastructure for biological information in Europe to support life science research and its translation to medicine and the environment, the bio-industries and society.
  
  
• EMBRACE will standardise access to bioinformatics resources, enabling data providers to provide well-defined interfaces to their databases that will conform to the same standards. This will allow users to make the most of dispersed data resources.
  
  
• ENFIN brings together experimentalists and computational biologists to develop the next generation of informatics resources for systems biology.
  
  
• SLING is about serving life science information for the next generation. Its goal is to make sure that advances in European science are supported by the best possible biomolecular information.
  

US National Institutes of Health - contributes funds to the ENCODE project , UniProt, the Gene Ontology (GO) project at the EBI, Reactome, and several other projects.

Wellcome Trust - Funds the Ensembl, PDBe databases, UKPMC, the ChEMBL group and several research projects. In addition, the Trust supports us by providing our premises on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus and has provided substantial funding towards an extension to the EBI building.

The UK research councils - The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) makes a major contribution towards funding research at the EBI, providing support for several postdoctoral fellows and students. It also provides funds for several services, including EMBOSS, the BioModels Database and InterPro. The Medical Research Council (MRC) funds several service and research projects. The UK research councils also provided substantial funds towards an extension to the EBI building.

EBI Industry Programme - Several of the world's leading pharmaceutical, biotechnology, consumer-goods and medical devices companies support the EBI through its Industry Programme. This allows industry to quickly adapt to, and maximise the benefit from, innovations in bioinformatics through training, research, and the development and adaptation of bioinformatics resources that are particularly relevant to industry.