The search for Ariadne, Barbie, and Superman succeeds with modern bioinformatics tools
Dresden bioinformatics group wins international competition in Madrid
What do Ken and Barbie, Superman, Groucho, and Ariadne have in common?
They are all gene names, which are ambiguous and which are known under
different names. Identifying gene names and interactions in text is
challenging problem for scientists and the pharmaceutical industry.
A
worldwide community of bioinformaticians gathered for the BioCreative
meeting on bioinformatics and textmining from 23 to 25 April 2007 in
Madrid. They compared their latest solutions to search in the life
sciences in a direct competition. The group of Michael Schroeder,
Professor for bioinformatics at the BIOTEC of TU Dresden and
coordinator of the NoE REWERSE working group on Bioinformatics,
participated in the category of gene identification. Jörg Hakenberg,
postdoc in the research group, reports entusiastically: "The hard work
of the past months has paid off: We have won the gold medal!".
Why
is such a search engine as developed by the Schroeder group so
important? Some genes, such as Aridne or Barbie have several names,
other names refer to several genes. All in all, a terminological jungle.
This problem is further multiplied by the ever growing amount of
literature - 2000 articles per day - and the advance of modern
experimental methods, which automatically analyse thousands of genes.
But the final results still have to be analysed manually. Jörg
Heinrich, chief scientific officer of the Dresden based Resprotect, who
work on cancer drugs, calculates: "Thousand interesting candidate genes
theoretically lead to millions of interactions between them. Therefore
it is paramount to develop novel search technologies, which couple
experimental methods and the exponentially growing literature."
"The
medal is indeed golden." confirms Dr. Michael R. Alvers, CEO of
Transinsight GmbH, located in BioInnovation Center Dresden. "As part of
our collaboration with Professor Schroeder and the TU Dresden we
optimise technology transfer of such results into our product GoPubMed,
the first knowledge-based search engine worldwide. Our customers and
partners such as Unilever and Elsevier are already waiting for the next
release of our search engine. Finding genes, proteins, and their
relationships in text is hot topic in the pharmaceutical industry."
About Transinsight
Founded
in 2005, Transinsight is focused on software solutions for the life
sciences providing products for knowledge based technologies. The
flagship product, GoPubMed, a well established biomedical search
engine, is the first knowledge based search engine for the Life
Sciences on the Internet. Transinsight is headquartered in one of the
leading German biotech incubators, the BioInnovationCenter Dresden
BIOZ, where science and business work under one roof. Transinsight
works in close collaboration with the Technische Universität Dresden.
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