EGCG provided support for core sequence activities at the Sanger Centre, and has been the basis of new sequence analysis software for internal use, as well as providing advanced features in use at approximately 150 sites, and for more than 10,000 users of EMBnet national services.
That project has reached the limits of what can be achieved using the GCG package. Specifically, it is no longer possible to distribute academic software source code which uses the GCG libraries and has become difficult even to distribute binaries.
As a result, the former EGCG developers have been designing a totally new generation of academic sequence analysis software. This has resulted in the present EMBOSS project.