The European Bioinformatics Institute, based near Cambridge, UK, is an outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an International Treaty Organisation founded in 1973 to promote molecular biology. The institute's mission is to provide an open information infrastructure for molecular biology. This includes information on the human genome and many others, the function of the proteins, the 3-dimensional structures of proteins and other resources. All these resources are embedded in international collaborations with the US and Asia.