The NCBI has been charged with creating automated systems for storing and analyzing knowledge about molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics; facilitating the use of such databases and software by the research and medical community; coordinating efforts to gather biotechnology information both nationally and internationally; and performing research into advanced methods of computer-based information processing for analyzing the structure and function of biologically important molecules. A government research organization under the NIH, NCBI maintains many public resources for biomedical research, such as:
Europe's flagship laboratory for the life sciences, the EMBL is a publicly-funded non-profit institute consisting of five sites across Europe, each member state's research efforts focused on one large area of molecular research: general molecular biology (Heidelberg), structural biology (Grenoble), structural biology (Hamburg), mouse biology (Monterotondo), and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hinxton UK.
The National Institute of Genetics (NIG), established to advance research in the life sciences, maintains three three core research arms: the Bioresources Center, the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ), and the DNA Sequencing Center.
The International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) is a long-standing foundational initiative that operates between DDBJ, ENA/EMBL and NCBI. INSDC covers the spectrum of data raw reads, though alignments and assemblies to functional annotation, enriched with contextual information relating to samples and experimental configurations.