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Upcoming virtual course about Protein characterisation using EMBL-EBI APIs

Join our virtual workshop on 5th June 2025 to learn how to access various protein resources and sequence analysis tools using APIs!

  • Date: 5th June 2025
  • Fee: £45.00
  • Limited to 35 participants – First come, first served!

Proteins are fundamental to biological processes, and understanding their sequence, structure, and function is crucial for various applications in research. This one-day, hands-on virtual workshop will guide participants through a structured, programmatic workflow using EMBL-EBI resources. Participants will learn how to retrieve protein sequences, identify homologs, annotate functional domains, and explore structural information using REST APIs. The course emphasises programmatic access (APIs) to integrate sequence, functional, and structural data into a unified analysis pipeline. Through a step-by-step Python workflow, participants will apply different EMBL-EBI tools to analyse an example protein, gaining practical experience in automating large-scale protein data analysis.

Who is this course for?

This course is designed for bioinformaticians and computational biologists who wish to learn how to automate the retrieval and analysis of protein-related data from EMBL-EBI resources for protein characterisation.

It is recommended that participants have a basic understanding of programming, ideally in Python, as the examples provided will be in Python.

Learning Outcomes

After completing the course you will be able to:

  • Describe various protein resources available at EMBL-EBI.
  • Understand the programmatic usage of EBI services for protein search.
  • Know how to integrate multiple EBI tools for comprehensive data analysis.
  • Gain practical experience through guided hands-on activities.

Course content

During the course you will learn how to use EMBL-EBI APIs to:

  • Retrieve protein sequence and metadata from UniProt
  • Identify homologs via Job Dispatcher Sequence Analysis Tools
  • Detect functional domains of proteins using InterPro
  • Search for entries for experimentally solved protein structures in PDBe and annotate functional sites using PDBe-KB
  • Retrieve AlphaFoldDB models for AI-predicted protein structures

If this is something that you may find interesting and useful to learn about, head to the events training page to register your interest.