Silicon Genetics has launched the BioScript Library — a collection of over 40 drag-and-drop scripts to automate analytical projects using the company’s GeneSpring and GeNet software. The scripting tools are available at no charge for current licensees at http://www.silicongenetics.com/bio.html.
Rosetta Biosoftware and Agilent Technologies have jointly launched version 2.0 of the Rosetta Luminator client-server system for storing and analyzing microarray data. New analytical features include ANOVA (analysis of variance), Bayesian classifiers, and principal components analysis.
The Macromolecular Structure Database group at the European Bioinformatics Institute has released its SSM (Secondary Structure Matching) protein structure comparison service for download and in-house installation at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/msd-srv/ssm/cgi-bin/ssmdcenter.
The Saccharomyces Genome Database project has constructed a preliminary Microbial Structure Ontology, which contains terms that can be used to describe structures made by fungi and other microbes: http://www.geneontology.org/doc/microbial _structure_ontology/.
Koada Technology has released Koadarray, a software package for automated analysis and quantification of array images. A 30-day free evaluation version of the software is available at http://www.koadarray.com. The company claims the software uses novel spot finding and artifact-exclusion algorithms.
Version 1.2 of the Bioconductor microarray analysis package will be available on May 28 at http://www.bioconductor.org. The 1.2 release works with version 1.7.X of the R statistical software package.
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has released the VEGA (Vertebrate Genome Annotation) database at http://vega.sanger.ac.uk/. The database is a central repository for manual annotation of vertebrate finished genome sequence. Annotations are currently available for human chromosomes 6, 13, 14, 20, and 22 and 168 finished clones from zebrafish.