Graham Cameron, Associate Director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute, says "This is an important milestone in the history of the nucleotide sequence databases. From the first EMBL Data Library entry made available in 1982 to today's provision of over 55 million sequence entries from at least 200,000 different organisms, these resources have anticipated the needs of molecular biologists and addressed them often in the face of a serious lack of resources."
David Lipman, Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, adds: "Today's nucleotide sequence databases allow researchers to share completed genomes, the genetic make-up of entire ecosystems, and sequences associated with patents. The INSDC has realized the vision of the researchers who initiated the sequence database projects, by making the global sharing of nucleotide sequence information possible."
Takashi Gojobori, Director of the Center for Information Biology and DNA Data Bank of Japan, says: "The INSDC has laid the foundations for the exchange of many types of biological information. As we enter the era of systems biology and researchers begin to exchange complex types of information, such as the results of experiments that measure the activities of thousands of genes, or computational models of entire processes, it is important to celebrate the achievements of the three databases t
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Contact: Sarah Sherwood
sherwood@embl.de
49-622-138-7125
European Molecular Biology Laboratory
22-Aug-2005