Practical 2: EMBL
Aim: To study the Sequence Information Resource “EMBL” on the web.
Principle:
Full-form of EMBL is European Molecular Biology Laboratory. It is actually a molecular biology research institution, established in 1974 by 22 member states of Europe. This is a primary sequence repository of Europe. It is maintained in close association with GenBank (discussed in Practical 2) and DDBJ. These three sequence repositories collect data/sequences from the entire world. They share information among themselves.
This laboratory is now located at five different places in Europe:
• Main laboratory/headquarters in Heidelberg.
• European bioinformatics institute in Hinxton, England (established in 1980). This is known as EMBL-EBI
• Grenoble (France)
• Hamburg (Germany)
• Monterotondo (Rome)
The primary work of this laboratory is to train people worldwide in the field of molecular biology. Large number of students, scientists and researchers visit EMBL every year. It is important to note that creation of EMBL was the dream of Noble laureates James Watson and John Kendrew, who discovered the structure of DNA in 1953.
The idea of creation of EMBL-EBI was generated in the year 1980. It took 12 years to finally establish EMBL-EBI in Hinxton in the year 1992. Current location of EMBL-EBI is Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK.
It is important to note that when EMBL was shifted to Hinxton, from Heidelberg, then it had large amount of data consisting of protein and DNA sequences. So, it hosted two databases:
• EMBL bank- for nucleotides
• SwissProt – TrEMBL- for proteins. This is now known as Uniprot.
The submission service of EMBL is known as Webin. To submit human data, controlled access is required; for this EGA-Webin is used.
Materials Required: Internet and dummy sequence.
Procedure:
1. First of all, open the EMBL; link is: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/
From here click “Services.” Then click “Data submission.”
2. For data submission, the screen will ask you some questions, like what type of sequence is there etc. “DNA/RNA sequences”.
If your data is based on sequence of any human gene, then it requires controlled access.
3. In the end, the screen will show “You can submit your data to the following database: European Nucleotide Archive.” Click on this.
4. A screen will open. Click on submit.
5. Welcome to Webin submission service will open. The screen will look somewhat like this:
Type your username and password over here if you already have an account. If you don’t have an account, then click “Register.” Fill up the registration form, and finally click “Register.”
6. You will get an account id, somewhat like this: Webin-44710.
7. Then click on “New submission” on the top “Menu-bar.”
8. Finally submit the sequence.
Results: The concept of EMBL understood.
Precautions: Same as Practical 1.