Info on a new web site, doubletwist.com, that uses software 'agents' to search many databases regarding a genetic sequence that you supply. Info comes from Slashdot "News for Nerds," excerpted below:
slashdot.org
New Genetic Information Web Portal
Posted by Hemos on Sunday November 07, @07:52AM EST
from the fun-with-double-helices dept.
Wonko42 writes "A new portal, DoubleTwist.com, has been opened which allows scientists and researchers [et al.] free access to tons of genetic information and data. Just type in a gene sequence, and it'll spew data back at you. It'll even notify you by email when there's new information about the stuff you're studying. Very cool. "
--------
[POSTS]
Interesting, but I'll wait and see. (Score:2, Insightful)
by Ichoran on Sunday November 07, @04:33PM EST (#43)
The sponsors of the site, Pangaea Systems, are known primarily for their sequence clustering tools, which are primarily of use to pharmaceutical companies at the moment. The idea is that, given a whole heck of a lot of genes, you would like to put them in to related "clusters" that may then be regulated or inhibited by similar drugs. Pharmaceuticals hope to use this to simplify drug design. (Hey, this antidepressant already binds to this protein...which looks a lot like this protein implicated in hypertension...I wonder...?)
For an average researcher, having a complete set of clusters usually is irrelevant. (Of course, it may not always be; once cluster information is available, people will probably figure out ways to use it well.) All they want to know is how similar their gene(s) of interest is/are to other known genes. And there are plenty of tools that do that already, most notably the set at NCBI. DoubleTwist offers little of use there.
The interesting concept is that of "agents" who go out and look for your data for you. Agents aren't new, but they have not been used much in biological research thus far. Most of the relevant data is at a very small number of sites, so setting up an agent might not be much easier than going around yourself, but if agents become prevalent it will allow biological information to sprawl all over the place to a much greater extent. I wonder if this is a good thing? It is nice to have all your data found for you automatically, but if that's the only way to find anything it may get burdensome.
...
-------
by Plasmic on Sunday November 07, @08:05AM EST (#3)
According to the data I retrieved from doubletwist.com, Rob Malda [slashdot founder] is my daddy!
|
