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Bielefeld University Center of Biotechnoloy Institute of Bioinformatics BiBiServ
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Databases
In this chapter the most important databases for your every day work will be introduced. The most important maintainers of such biological databases are:
   
Established in 1988 as a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the NCBI serves as a national resource for molecular biology information: it creates public databases, conducts research in computational biology, develops software tools for analyzing genome data, and disseminates biomedical information - all for the better understanding of molecular processes affecting human health and disease.
 
The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is a non-profit academic organisation that forms part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). The EMBL is an international network of research institutes funded by contributions from seventeen countries and dedicated to research in molecular biology. The EBI is a centre for research and services in bioinformatics. The institute manages databases of biological data including nucleic acid, protein sequences and macromolecular structures.
 
Topics discussed in this database section will be:
  • literature databases: citations and author abstracts from biomedical journals
  • sequence databases for nucleotide and protein sequences, from fragments of sequences to whole genomes
  • taxonomic databases allow to retrieve the names of all organisms that are represented in the genetic databases
It is almost impossible to keep a list of all available databases up to date. Nevertheless, ExPASy tries to keep a list of all information sources for life scientists with an interest in biological macromolecules at: http://www.expasy.org/links.html. Check the link if your have not found what you are looking for.
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