ERIC represents a team between industry and academia:

SRA International, a systems integrator primarily serving the Federal government and based in Fairfax, Virginia, operates a bioinformatics practice from our Rockville, Maryland office. Among our achievements are assisting the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Center for Information Technology at NIH to design, develop, and operate the NCI microArray database - one of the largest such systems with over 1,500 users and 70,000 microarrays. SRA also developed Open Source bioinformatics software at NCI's Laboratory of Molecular Pharmacology, including MatchMiner and GoMiner. SRA's information systems and integration expertise gives industry best practices and processes to integrate, operate, and grow ERIC. John M. Greene, Ph.D. is the Principal Investigator for ERIC.

The Genome Center of Wisconsin (GCW) has a long history of pioneering research in microbial genomics. Representatives of the five enteropathogens ERIC covers (except Y. enterocolitica) have been sequenced by the GCW, and their scientists are considered among the world's experts in annotating and curating these genomes. Their comparative genomic analysis of diarrheagenic E. coli O157:H7 and E. coli K-12 revealed new horizons in understanding pathogenicity, and they have been strong advocates of the compelling need to annotate the genomes with carefully curated information. The ASAP (A Systematic Annotation Package for community analysis of genomes) system used by ERIC for community genome annotation is among the first of its kind, particularly for microbial genomes, and has features for annotation and curation not found in other such bioinformatics systems. Its use for community annotation of the enterobacterial plant pathogen Erwinia chrysanthemi provided proof-of-principle for such a web-based approach. Professors Nicole T. Perna, Ph.D. and Frederick R. Blattner, Ph.D. act as Scientific Co-directors of ERIC at the GCW.

With the SRA/GCW Team, NIAID and the enteropathogen research community gets the best of both worlds - top notch science and professional, disciplined information technologies, capable of addressing all of the ERIC's needs.

The primary objective for ERIC is to provide integrated access to both data and analysis tools. As much as possible, ERIC adopts an Open Source software approach and emphasizes integration and reuse of existing tools, for the single greatest problem in bioinformatics remains the need to integrate data and tools to work together seamlessly.

The ERIC Team interacts widely with the enterobacterial research community, disseminating knowledge of the ERIC system, providing training on the system and on annotation, soliciting feedback on system development and features, and facilitating development of ontologies and controlled vocabularies working with the other BRCs and the community. The ERIC Team works with a Scientific Working Group of distinguished experts in enteropathogen biology and bioinformatics to help advise and guide this project.

The goals for this BRC are straightforward - ERIC intends to provide the best annotated enterobacterial genomes and information available, accessed through a comprehensive, easy to use, open web portal uniting biological data and analysis tools.

Acknowledgements:

We thank Dr. Stephan Bour of the NIAID OTIS Bioinformatics and Scientific IT Program for providing the high performance computing infrastructure used to perform BLAST and InterProScan searches on ERIC's genomes.