During the 1990s the EMBL Data Library was renamed the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database[REF] and was formally relocated to the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) from Heidelberg [REF].
Following the uptake of Sanger sequencing, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (then known as The Sanger Centre) had begun cataloguing sequence reads along with quality information in a database called The Trace Archive [REF].