NEW YORK, June 4 – Matrix Science, a London-based bioinformatics company, said Monday that Applied Biosystems had agreed to be a distributor of its Mascot protein identification software.
Financial terms of the non-exclusive deal were not disclosed.
"Mascot software has been widely adopted by many researchers in the field proteomics and has developed an excellent reputation," Mark Allen, director of Proteomics for LC/MS products for Applied Biosystems, said in a statement. "With this agreement we can now provide seamless integration of Mascot software to our Qstar Pulsar system."
Mascot’s software, which comprises a search engine and a web-browser interface, matches data from mass spectrometers against protein and nucleic acid databases. Search results can also be imported into a database for data mining processes.
“It’s like doing a Blast search but using mass values,” said John Cottrell, director of Matrix Science.
Mascot can accept data for all the major types of mass spectrometers and has the ability to run on all mainstream computing platforms, including Tru64 Unix, Irix, Linux, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows.
Established in 1998, Matrix Science, a privately held company, has sold Mascot to over 100 customers. The entry price for Mascot is about $10,000, said Cottrell, adding that other companies such as Bruker Daltonics, Shimadzu, and Agilent, were also distributors of the software.