NEW YORK – UK-based bioinformatics firm Genestack and the City University of New York (CUNY) said last week that they're collaborating on data curation for BioConductor, an open-source bioinformatics program.
Researchers will use Genestack's Open Data Manager (ODM) platform to simplify data curation, helping researchers upload, organize, and annotate genomic data. Financial and other details of the collaboration were not disclosed.
According to a spokesperson for Genestack, the collaborators may also jointly build tools in the future to enhance curation speed and accuracy of public data in a more automated way.
"Our project aims to enhance the artificial intelligence [and] machine learning readiness of publicly accessible omics data, with a particular emphasis on enhancing metadata quality," Sehyun Oh, a CUNY researcher, said in a statement, noting that her team will also be collaborating with researchers at the University of Colorado, Italy's University of Trento, and Northeastern University.
"This partnership will not only drive better quality AI models but also introduce the next generation of scientists to what high quality data curation looks like and how easy it can actually be," Leo Whyte, head of customer growth at Genestack, said in a statement.
According to its website, the open-source Bioconductor project "provides software for associating microarray and other genomic data in real time with biological metadata from web databases such as GenBank, Entrez genes, and PubMed" as well as tools for assembling and processing genomic annotation data.
Cambridge, UK-based Genestack offers tools to address data management and collaboration in genomics.