The Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics (SIB) and the EBI initiated a major effort to annotate, describe and distribute to the scientific community a large amount of highly curated information concerning human protein sequences. This initiative is tightly linked to an appeal to the user community to participate actively in this effort.

The EBI, together with other institutions, intend to set up a large database for results from DNA microarray gene expression experiments. This article shows why this is needed, and how this will help the scientific community as a whole.

Gene prediction is an important field, with many of the authors of gene prediction algorithms vying for the best `accuracy´. However, measurents are often made with their own data sets. This article presents not only standards and protocols to create clean data sets that can be used for comparative studies, but also points you to a clean data set that is the result of using these standards.

Using bioinformatics methods researchers from the EBI show that, contrary to popular belief, Archaea and Eukaryotes do not descend from Bacteria, but Eukaryotes and Bacteria descend from Archaea.

The GenomeBuilder is a Java tool designed to visualise and further process EST and high-throughput genomic sequence assemblies. It can, for example, be used to build consensus contigs. The tool uses CORBA to integrate and access the different databases and computing resources

An update of the current status of the external services at the EBI. In short, new machines arrived and are set up to handle bigger job loads. Improvements in turnaround time for jobs like Fasta and Clustalw, as well as for SRS searches will be seen soon.

Professional backgrounds of new staff that have arrived during the last couple of months to take up duty at EBI.