European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an intergovernmental organisation with headquarters in Heidelberg (Germany), is Europe’s flagship laboratory for the life sciences, with more than 80 independent groups covering the spectrum of molecular biology. Since 1994, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) has been leading computational biology research. Its work spans genomic analysis to systems biology and helps scientists realize the potential of “big data” in biology.

EMBL-EBI is a core part of the collaboration to build the Human Cell Atlas Data Coordination Platform (HCA DCP) and its team is leading efforts to ingest data into the DCP, leveraging 20 years of experience in archiving and distributing biological data. The HCA DCP provides an extensible framework for acquisition, standardization, storage, analysis and access of cellular resolution molecular data.

One of the EMBL-EBI’s tasks in the Work Package 5 is to support HCA|Organoid to ensure that the complex data generated by the consortium are well described in HCA DCP systems and that its structure enables the creation of downstream resources to support scientists selecting the appropriate organoid model for their experiments. Moreover, another task in WP5 consists in ensuring that the consortium’s needs to build a web portal for the exploration of the generated organoid and matched ex vivo profiles will be supported by the HCA metadata standards and acquisition process.