HMMER web servers were officially launched today at the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge UK. You can read an EBI press release here. This marks the completion of the pilot HMMER server project at Janelia Farm and its transition to the EBI. All of this has been led by Rob Finn, now the head of sequence family resources at EBI. A huge thank you goes out to Rob and his team at Janelia (Jody Clements, Bill Arndt, and Ben Miller), to HHMI for funding the pilot project, and to the EBI for agreeing to adopt the pilot project and making it all grown up and respectable.
Today we've separated the code development home (hmmer.org) from the servers (www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/hmmer/)). Nonetheless, the two sites are pointing back and forth at each other, so you can download the current HMMER release and documentation from EBI, and you navigate to EBI's search pages starting from hmmer.org. We even think that RESTful URLs for the pilot servers at hmmer.org will continue to be forwarded and served properly by the new EBI servers. Let us know if you experience any glitches.
Rob's team at EBI will run the EBI servers, and the Eddy/Rivas lab will continue to be responsible for hmmer.org. Because of the terrifyingly sophisticated planning processes we employ in the HMMER project, or maybe it's just a coincidence, the EBI announcement comes just days before our move to Harvard. Everything HMMER-related at Janelia will now wind down quickly over the next few months. A big change for us. If you're used to using hmmer.janelia.org, switch to using the project's permanent URL at hmmer.org. We're about to turn out the lights here at Janelia.