The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is a basic research institute funded by 18 member states, including most of the EU, Switzerland and Israel. Research at EMBL is conducted by approximately 80 independent groups covering the spectrum of molecular biology. The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge (UK). The EBI grew out of EMBL's pioneering work in providing public biological databases to the research community. It hosts some of the world's most important collections of biological data, including DNA sequences (EMBL-Bank), protein sequences (UniProt), animal genomes (Ensembl), three-dimensional structures (the Macromolecular Structure Database) and data from microarray experiments (ArrayExpress). Ewan Birney supervises the EBI involvement in the EMMA project. He is the Principal Investigator of the EBI's Ensembl team, which provides an easy-to-use and free for all database of the human genome, along with the genomes of several other higher animals.