This article is part of the supplement: European Molecular Biology Network (EMBnet) Conference 2008: 20th Anniversary Celebration. Leading applications and technologies in bioinformatics .

Introduction

The 20^th anniversary of EMBnet: 20 years of bioinformatics for the Life Sciences community

Domenica D'Elia¹ , Andreas Gisel¹ , Nils-Einar Eriksson² , Sophia Kossida³ , Kimmo Mattila⁴ , Lubos Klucar⁵ and Erik Bongcam-Rudloff⁶

¹  Institute for Biomedical Technologies, CNR, Via Amendola 122/D, 70126 Bari, Italy

²  Uppsala Biomedical Centre (BMC), Computing Department, University of Uppsala, Box 570 SE-751 23 Uppsala, Sweden

³  Bioinformatics & Medical Informatics Team, Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens, 11527 Athens, Greece

⁴  CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd., Keilaranta 14, 02100 Espoo, Finland

⁵  Institute of Molecular Biology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dubravska cesta 21, 84551 Bratislava, Slovakia

⁶  Department of Animal Breeding and Genetics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 75024 Uppsala, Sweden

author email corresponding author email

from European Molecular Biology Network (EMBnet) Conference 2008: 20th Anniversary Celebration
Martina Franca, Italy. 18–20 September 2008

BMC Bioinformatics 2009, 10(Suppl 6):S1doi:10.1186/1471-2105-10-S6-S1

Published:	16 June 2009

Abstract

The EMBnet Conference 2008, focusing on 'Leading Applications and Technologies in Bioinformatics', was organized by the European Molecular Biology network (EMBnet) to celebrate its 20^th anniversary. Since its foundation in 1988, EMBnet has been working to promote collaborative development of bioinformatics services and tools to serve the European community of molecular biology laboratories. This conference was the first meeting organized by the network that was open to the international scientific community outside EMBnet. The conference covered a broad range of research topics in bioinformatics with a main focus on new achievements and trends in emerging technologies supporting genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics analyses such as high-throughput sequencing and data managing, text and data-mining, ontologies and Grid technologies. Papers selected for publication, in this supplement to BMC Bioinformatics, cover a broad range of the topics treated, providing also an overview of the main bioinformatics research fields that the EMBnet community is involved in.