Paris and Munich

On the up: the European Bioinformatics Institute is benefiting from an injection of cash.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) based near Cambridge in Britain is to receive an infusion of 19 million euros (US$16.6 million) from the European Commission over the next three years.

The cash injection marks an important turning point for the EBI. In 1999, the institute faced bankruptcy after the European council of research ministers decided that the fifth Framework funding programme would not support core funding and operational costs for infrastructure.

But after widespread protests, the European Commission effectively reversed this decision last November and earmarked 25 million euros over three years for “genomic and proteomic databases and repositories of suitable animal models”.

Programmes coordinated by the EBI will receive the lion's share of this sum. Among the non-EBI projects to benefit is the European Mouse Mutant Archive (EMMA), centred in Rome, which will get 4 million euros. “This has been a real life-saver for us,” says Martin Hrabé de Angelis, EMMA's scientific director.

Of the total grant to the EBI, 4.3 million euros each year will go directly to the institute for its own operations, adding to existing support of 8.4 million euros per year from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory — set to increase to 11.4 million euros by 2005 — and annual funding of around 2 million euros from the Wellcome Trust.

A new plan to integrate biological databases, known as Integr8, is the largest single project to be supported with the funds. This will develop standards, databases and software to allow scientists to draw on relevant material from all biological databases and the scientific literature. “This is perhaps the project I'm most excited about,” says Graham Cameron, joint head of the EBI.

In addition, 6 million euros will be spent implementing a planned European Macromolecular Structure Database. This is intended to serve as a counterpart to the US Protein Data Bank.