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- Managing and sharing data
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The role of public databases
Bioinformatics centres of excellences
There are a small number of bioinformatics centres of excellence worldwide that have taken on the responsibility to collect, catalogue and provide open access to published biological data (Figure 3). Among these centres are:
- The EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
- The US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
- The National Institute of Genetics in Japan (NIG)
This work began in the early 1980s when DNA sequence data began to accumulate in the scientific literature. The EMBL Data Library (now the European Nucleotide Archive) was developed to store DNA sequences published in the scientific literature. The NCBI’s GenBank and NIG’s DDBJ followed.
