The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) has a long-standing mission to collect, organise and make available databases for biomolecular science. It makes available a collection of databases along with tools to search, download and analyse their content. These databases include DNA and protein sequences and structures, genome annotation, gene expression information, molecular interactions and pathways. Connected to these are linking and descriptive data resources such as protein motifs, ontologies and many others. In many of these efforts, the EBI is a European node in global data-sharing agreements involving, for example, the USA and Japan.