GeneGo has integrated Accelrys' Accord chemistry engine with its MetaDrug ADME/tox and medicinal chemistry informatics platform. Accord will enable molecule visualization and database searching capabilities within MetaDrug, which includes pathway content, proprietary algorithms for metabolite prediction, and ADME/tox QSAR models. "The bi-directional digital interface ensures the rapid and secure transfer of analytical run information directly from Watson to Xcalibur and the return of results back to Watson without an intermediate file," said Joel Usansky, product manager for Watson LIMS, in a statement.
The BioTeam has released its iNquiry XTE software for Apple's OS X 10.4 "Tiger" operating system. INquiry XTE is a web services-based desktop client for use with Apple workgroup clusters running iNquiry. It uses Apple's application development technology to provide a GUI for more than 170 command-line bioinformatics applications.
Circos v0.21, a software package for generating circular representations of genomic data and related annotations, is available from the Genome Sciences Center at Canada's British Columbia Cancer Agency at http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/circos. Circos is specifically designed for visualizing alignments, conservation, and intra- and inter-chromosomal relationships within a genome, between genomes, or between any two or more sets of objects with a corresponding distance scale.
BioSens, a Matlab-based application for performing sensitivity analysis on deterministic models of biological systems, is available from the University of California Santa Barbara at http://www.chemengr.ucsb.edu/~ceweb/faculty/doyle/biosens/BioSens.htm. BioSens is UCSB's contribution to DARPA's BioSPICE project.
The Entrez Gene database from the National Center for Biotechnology Information now includes an initial set of molecular assembly data from the Blueprint Initiative's Biomolecular Interaction Network Database (see briefs). Entrez Gene includes protein-protein, protein-nucleic acid, and protein-small molecule interactions from BIND. In some cases the complex the interactants form is also described. Current records (6,773) in Gene with BIND data can be retrieved at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=gene&cmd=search&term=BIND+AND+interactions. NCBI has also introduced a new database called Probe, which contains molecules that complement a specific mRNA or DNA sequence, at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=probe.
See feature story, this issue, for a list of software products released at last week's American Society for Mass Spectrometry conference in San Antonio, Texas.