PANDA Group

The Protein and Nucleotide Database Group (PANDA) is a large group providing all the sequence resources at the EBI, from DNA through to Protein and encompassing the associated databases, such as genome databases (eg, Ensembl), protein families (eg, InterPro), protein function (eg, UniProtKB), proteomics (eg, IntAct) ontologies (eg, GOA), and pathways (eg, Reactome).

It is jointly headed by Dr. Rolf Apweiler and Dr. Ewan Birney, with Dr. Apweiler and Dr. Birney taking responsibility for Proteins and Nucleotides respectively and sharing responsibility for other areas.

While PANDA has a large number of specific projects, each with their own collaborators, data flows and distributions, there is considerable coordination of information across the entire PANDA group - for example, new DNA sequences deposited in the EMBL archive provide the foundation for genome databases, which in turn provides protein sequence for protein predictions; furthermore the curation of protein information informs the gene structure predictions on genomes and the association of genes to function. The requirement for extensive linking of both the underlying data and the coordination of web resources is the driving force behind having one overarching group.

The philosophy of the PANDA team is to capture, organise and interpret sequence-related data, providing all information freely to all groups [* footnote] in a variety of formats, including user friendly web sites. Wherever possible, we aim to collaborate with other groups worldwide with similar aims.

[* the only exception is when there are ethical restrictions due to individual medical phenotype information in the European Genotype Archive, which is distributed in accordance to ethics on the release of individuals' data]