Adoption by EMBRACE

EMBRACE is the European Model for Bioinformatics Research And Community Education (EMBRACE). It consists of a large number of partners throughout Europe.

The objective of EMBRACE is to draw together a wide group of experts throughout Europe who are involved in the use of information technology in the biomolecular sciences. The EMBRACE Network of Excellence will optimise informatics and information exploitation by pure and applied biological scientists in both the academic and commercial sectors.

The University of Manchester is a member of the EMBRACE project, and the has been adopted by EMBRACE as its workflow system of choice.

The suitability of Taverna workbench has been confirmed by its use in several test cases:

• The use of Taverna to access Grid Protein Sequence Analysis (GPSA) webservices as described by Blanchet et al. in the paper Web Services Interface to Run Protein Sequence Tools on Grid, Testcase of Protein Sequence Alignment . This includes the running of the webservices on EGEE grid.
• Taverna has been used to automate the cleaning up and extraction of data by the EMBRACE project from the tGRAP database of mutated G-protein coupled receptors.
• The ProDom-based protein family analyses test case includes the use of Taverna within ProDom.

The tGRAP work is described in the document The reincarnation of the tGRAP database by Vroling.

Use of Taverna allows the members of EMBRACE to have ready access to the existing bioinformatics services and also to the myGrid team’s expertise in this area. Correspondingly, the members of EMBRACE represent a diverse group of users with different backgrounds and infrastructure.