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 The campus grounds, 2010 | |
| Established | 1993 [1] |
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Field of research | |
| Staff | c. 1,400 |
| Address | Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Saffron Walden, CB10 1SA |
| Location | Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, UK |
| Affiliations | |
| John Sulston | |
| Website | www |
The Wellcome Genome Campus is a scientific research campus built in the grounds of Hinxton Hall, Hinxton in Cambridgeshire, England. [2] [3] [4] [5]
The Campus is home to some institutes and organisations in genomics and computational biology. The Campus is part of the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation that exists to improve health, and houses the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), the bioinformatics outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), and a number of biotech companies whose UK offices are located in the BioData Innovation Centre acting as an incubator for businesses of all sizes.
In 2020, the South Cambridgeshire District Council granted outline planning permission for an expansion of the Campus. [6] The expansion will increase the overall Campus grounds from 125 acres to 440 acres. [7] The first buildings are expected to be completed in 2026. [7]
At the Campus, genome and biodata research takes place. The Campus provides bioinformatics services and delivers training in genomics and biodata to scientists and clinicians.
At the time of its official opening by the Princess Royal in 1994, the Wellcome Genome Campus was already home to the Wellcome Sanger Institute (then called the Sanger Centre), the Medical Research Council’s Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI).
Wellcome funded the establishment of the Sanger Centre in 1993 and chose Hinxton as the home for its new genome research institute. Shortly after, EMBL-EBI located on the same site, and the two institutes formed a natural fit, consolidating expertise, facilities and knowledge in one place and enabling both to contribute a major role in the Human Genome Project – a global collaboration to sequence the first ‘reference’ human genome.
One third of the human genome was sequenced for the first time at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and the data was stored and shared through EMBL-EBI. This was the largest single contribution of any centre to the Human Genome Project, making the Campus and its collaborations uniquely important in the history of genomics.[ citation needed ]
Since the announcement of the completion of the draft human genome in 2000, and final completion in 2003, rapid progress in sequencing technology has enabled new areas of Science to be opened up for exploration. At its opening in 1994, the Campus housed approximately 400 employees. This has grown to over 2,600 people employed at the Wellcome Genome Campus today, making the Campus a densely concentrated and globally significant cluster for biodata and genomics expertise.[ citation needed ]
The first recorded owner of the estate, in 1506, was the college of Michaelhouse in Cambridge but it wasn’t until the early eighteenth century that the first building – a modest hunting and fishing lodge – was erected by Captain Joseph Richardson of Horseheath. It became a gentleman’s retreat with well-stocked trout ponds and fields full of partridge.
The current Hall was built by John Bromwell Jones in 1748 and remains today as the central three-storey block on the Campus. Opposite the house were stables, a kitchen garden and an orchard, all of which still exist, albeit in altered form.
By 1800 ownership of the Hall and estate had passed to the Green family, who remained until 1920, when the Hall was sold to the Robinsons. During the Second World War, the Hall was used for billeting American soldiers, stationed at the local airbase at Duxford.
In 1953 the Hall and grounds were sold to Tube Investments Plc for us as research laboratories, which closed in the late 1980s. The site remained under their ownership until it was sold to Genome Research Limited in 1992.
The Wellcome Trust established the Sanger Centre in 1992 to undertake the most ambitious project ever attempted in biology, sequencing the human genome. The new facility developed laboratory infrastructure, robotics, team working and computational approaches on a scale unprecedented in life sciences.[ citation needed ]
In 2000, the first draft of the human genome was announced with the Sanger Centre championing open access to the data and making the largest contribution to the global collaborative endeavour. [8] Genomes began to convert biology into big data science. The subsequently renamed Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute established long term research programmes to explore and apply genome sequences.
In the field of bioinformatics, a sequence database is a type of biological database that is composed of a large collection of computerized ("digital") nucleic acid sequences, protein sequences, or other polymer sequences stored on a computer. The UniProt database is an example of a protein sequence database. As of 2013 it contained over 40 million sequences and is growing at an exponential rate. Historically, sequences were published in paper form, but as the number of sequences grew, this storage method became unsustainable.
The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to molecular biology research and is supported by 29 member states, one prospect member state, and one associate member state. EMBL was created in 1974 and is funded by public research money from its member states. Research at EMBL is conducted by more than 110 independent research groups and service teams covering the spectrum of molecular biology.
UniProt is a freely accessible database of protein sequence and functional information, many entries being derived from genome sequencing projects. It contains a large amount of information about the biological function of proteins derived from the research literature. It is maintained by the UniProt consortium, which consists of several European bioinformatics organisations and a foundation from Washington, DC, USA.
The Wellcome Sanger Institute, previously known as The Sanger Centre and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is a non-profit British genomics and genetics research institute, primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust.
The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is an intergovernmental organization (IGO) which, as part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) family, focuses on research and services in bioinformatics. It is located on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge, and employs over 600 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff. Institute leaders such as Rolf Apweiler, Alex Bateman, Ewan Birney, and Guy Cochrane, an adviser on the National Genomics Data Center Scientific Advisory Board, serve as part of the international research network of the BIG Data Center at the Beijing Institute of Genomics.
John Frederick William Birney is joint director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire and deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge. Birney has made significant contributions to genomics, through his development of innovative bioinformatics and computational biology tools. He previously served as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Hinxton is a village in South Cambridgeshire, England.
Dame Janet Maureen Thornton, is a senior scientist and director emeritus at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). She is one of the world's leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function. She served as director of the EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a key role in ELIXIR.
Richard Mott is Weldon Professor of Computational and Statistical Genetics in the research department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. He was previously at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics and a Professor by Research at Oxford University.
ChEMBL or ChEMBLdb is a manually curated chemical database of bioactive molecules with drug inducing properties. It is maintained by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), based at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK.
Transmembrane protein 229b is a protein that in humans is encoded by the TMEM229b gene.
The European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) is a repository providing free and unrestricted access to annotated DNA and RNA sequences. It also stores complementary information such as experimental procedures, details of sequence assembly and other metadata related to sequencing projects. The archive is composed of three main databases: the Sequence Read Archive, the Trace Archive and the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database. The ENA is produced and maintained by the European Bioinformatics Institute and is a member of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) along with the DNA Data Bank of Japan and GenBank.
ELIXIR is an initiative that allows life science laboratories across Europe to share and store their research data as part of an organised network. Its goal is to bring together Europe's research organisations and data centres to help coordinate the collection, quality control and storage of large amounts of biological data produced by life science experiments. ELIXIR aims to ensure that biological data is integrated into a federated system easily accessible by the scientific community.
Genomics England is a British company set up and owned by the United Kingdom Department of Health and Social Care to run the 100,000 Genomes Project. The project aimed in 2014 to sequence 100,000 genomes from NHS patients with a rare disease and their families, and patients with cancer. An infectious disease strand is being led by Public Health England.
Alexander George Bateman is a computational biologist and Head of Protein Sequence Resources at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Cambridge, UK. He has led the development of the Pfam biological database and introduced the Rfam database of RNA families. He has also been involved in the use of Wikipedia for community-based annotation of biological databases.
Sarah Amalia Teichmann is a German scientist who is head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a visiting research group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). She serves as director of research in the Cavendish Laboratory, at the University of Cambridge and a senior research fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.
The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) is an international consortium that is developing standards for responsibly collecting, storing, analyzing, and sharing genomic data in order to enable an "internet of genomics". GA4GH was founded in 2013.
Nicholas Goldman is a group leader and senior scientist at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), located on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, England. He began working at the EBI in 2002, and became a senior scientist there in 2009. His group's research focuses on evolutionary genetics and genomics. He and his EBI colleague Ewan Birney, along with other researchers, developed a tool for DNA digital data storage, on which they successfully encoded all the sonnets of William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, a PDF of the 1953 paper "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid", and a photo of their own institute. They described their results in a 2013 paper in Nature.
Protein Data Bank in Europe – Knowledge Base (PDBe-KB) is a community-driven, open-access, integrated resource whose mission is to place macromolecular structure data in their biological context and to make them accessible to the scientific community in order to support fundamental and translational research and education. It is part of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, England.
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