EMBRACE (A European Model for Bioinformatics Research and Community Education) is a project with the objective of drawing together a wide group of experts throughout Europe who are involved in the use of information technology in the biomolecular sciences. The EMBRACE Network of Excellence will optimise informatics and information exploitation by pure and applied biological scientists in both the academic and commercial sectors.The EMBRACE network will work to integrate the major databases and software tools in bioinformatics, using existing methods and emerging Grid service technologies. The integration efforts will be driven by an expanding set of test problems representing key issues for bioinformatics service providers and end-user biologists. As a result, groups throughout Europe will be able to use the EMBRACE service interfaces for their own local or proprietary data and tools.EMBRACE makes many ready-to-go bioinformatics web services freely available to the international research community.The project is run from the EBI in Hinxton, England. Fred Marcus is its EU project coordinator.The EMBRACE project is funded by the European Commission within its FP6 Programme, under the thematic area "Life sciences, genomics and biotechnology for health", contract number LHSG-CT-2004-512092.