Recent highlights fromthe CNR Institute for Biomedical Technologies: EMBnet Italy

The CNR-ITB research team in Bari, Italy, was among the pioneers of bioinformatics research in Italy. As a founder member of EMBnet, it served as the national bioinformatics service hub from 1989, and has continued to do so for more than 20 years. Alongside this primary role, the Institute was also the first in Italy equipped with a 454 ROCHE Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) platform. The advent of NGS technologies has completely transformed how research is performed, requiring multidisciplinary collaborations and establishment of strong interconnections between wet-lab and bioinformatics researchers. The Italian EMBnet team comprises biologists (specialising in functional genomics and transcriptomics, cancer research, neurological diseases, organism evolution and phylogeny) and computer scientists, statisticians and bioinformaticians (specialising in the development of analysis algorithms, databases and platforms for integrative bioinformatics).