EMBnet, the Global Bioinformatics Network, in 2013: A Silver Anniversary

Abstract

EMBnet’s 2013 Annual General Meeting (AGM) and associated events were hosted in the TRYP Valencia Oceanic Hotel, Valencia, Spain, from 14 to 18 May. The AGM, the silver anniversary of EMBnet’s foundation, provided a timely opportunity both to review our progress since the “ EMBnet Moving Forward: 2010 & beyond ” workshop hosted in Ruvo di Puglia, Italy (Attwood et al ., 2010), and to showcase the work of our allied SeqAhead project. EMBnet has undergone significant changes since 2010: it has rebranded and launched a new website; it has formed new alliances; it has incubated new initiatives (notably, GOBLET) and multidisciplinary research projects (namely, SeqAhead and AllBio); and it has formally introduced structural changes to streamline our activities and broaden our membership. The events allied to the AGM included a full-day EMBnet hands-on tutorial on RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data analysis given by Endre Barta (U. of Debrecen, Hungary) and Eija Korpelainen (CSC- IT Center for Science, Finland), and on NGS and structural Biology , given by Goran Neshich (EMBRAPA, Brazil), Jose R. Valverde (CNB-CSIC, Spain) and Gert Vried (CMBI, Holland); the two-day SeqAhead “ The Next NGS Challenge: Data Processing and Integration ” conference and Management Committee meeting; a full-day EMBnet workshop; and finally, the business meeting itself. Here, we review the motivation for the EMBnet workshop, and present its main conclusions.