EGTDC EST-Bioinformatics workshop
The Environmental Genomics Thematic Programme Data Centre (EGTDC,
http://envgen.nox.ac.uk/) provides comprehensive bioinformatics and
data management solutions for environmental genomics research. EGTDC
bioinformatics solutions are based on Bio-Linux as an integrated,
bioinformatics-centred, Linux-based operating system (Bio-Linux3.0,
http://envgen.nox.ac.uk/biolinux.html). The first EGTDC workshop on
EST-Bioinformatics took place on the 1st of December 2003 at the
National e-science centre in Edinburgh. ESTs (expressed sequence tags)
are used by an increasing number of laboratories for gene discovery in
a wide variety of organisms. The bioinformatics challenge lies in
processing and organising this data within a genomic context to
facilitate large scale analysis. The two main achievements of the
workshop were in the presentation of the EGTDC developed EST-analysis
software solutions trace2dbest, PartiGene and prot4EST
(http://www.nematodes.org/PartiGene/) to the public and in getting
together software developers, bioinformaticians and bench biologists to
discuss problems in EST-analysis and, in particular, further directions
of EST-software development. The overwhelmingly positive feedback
encourages the organizers to plan a second EGTDC EST-Bioinformatics
workshop for 2004.