DNAStar has released a beta version of the Lasergene suite for Macintosh OS X at its website (www.dnastar.com). The beta release is available to customers with a current support contract for their Mac Lasergene system and is not available for networks. Customers registered for network systems may download a 120-day demonstration while the company upgrades its network support.
BioPerl 1.2 is now available from BioPerl.org at www.bioperl.org/ftp/ DIST/. Improvements over the 1.0 series include an extended and improved Bio::Perl module, updated documentation resources, including documentation on Windows installation, and http access to the Entrez system at NCBI using the Entrez Utilities system.
The latest release pf GOA (GO [email protected]) is available from the European Bioinformatics Institute at ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/ databases/GO/goa/. GOA provides assignments of gene products to the Gene Ontology. The update includes the 5th release of GOA-SPTR — all GO annotations that exist in Swiss-Prot and Trembl — and the 7th release of GOA-Human — annotation for the Swiss-Prot/Trembl/Ensembl non-redundant human proteome set.
The biological chemistry department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has released ProToGO, an online tool for evaluating biological features of protein sets, at www.protogo.cs.huji.ac.il. ProToGO uses the GOA and Compugen annotations of SwissProt, Trembl, and proteins from GenBank.
Tetsuro Toyoda and colleagues at Riken have released a Flash-based genome viewer using a Distributed Annotation System server at http://gscope.gsc.riken.go.jp/. The database contains preliminary human, mouse, and Arabidopsis data as well as metabolic pathway data and genetic mapping data.
ProtoNet 2.1 is now available from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at www.protonet.cs. huji.ac.il. ProtoNet is an automatic classification of protein sequences based on hierarchical clustering of all Swiss-Prot proteins.