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The Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium has released Endeavour, a computer program for identifying disease genes, at http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~bioiuser/endeavour/endeavour.php. The application prioritizes candidate genes underlying biological processes or diseases based on their similarity to known genes involved in these phenomena.
Ingenuity Systems has launched a biomarker workflow guide to help users of its Ingenuity Pathways Analysis software identify potential biomarkers when analyzing gene expression array or proteomics data. With the workflow guide, "researchers can more easily prioritize biomarker leads by associating them with biology relevant to the observed phenotype," the company said.
AiO (All in One) 8, a software package that integrates several oligo-ordering, database, and DNA/protein analysis programs, is available at http://134.99.88.55/aio/.
The National Center for Biotechnology Information has released RefSeq 17 at ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/refseq/release/. The release incorporates genomic, transcript, and protein data and includes 2,631,538 proteins and sequences from 3,497 different organisms.
Proxeon has released ProteinCenter Open Access, a free online version of the company's ProteinCenter resource, at http://www.proxeon.com/proteincenter-open-access.html. ProteinCenter Open Access includes a "small subset" of the functionality of the commercial version of ProteinCenter, Proxeon said. It enables single-protein queries of more than 22 million protein accession codes from GenBank, Refseq, EMBL, UniProt, Swiss-Prot, Trembl, PIR, IPI, PDB, and Ensembl.
Stone Bond Technologies has launched the Affymetrix GeneChip-Compatible Instrument Interface, which is designed to integrate the company's EE-LIMS data-management system with the Affy microarray platform. The EE-Instrument Interface Suite has built-in wizards for registering sample data automatically from spreadsheets and CSV files, and for converting and moving data into the Affymetrix GCOS software.
Massively Parallel Technologies has launched the Sequence Manipulation Suite (SMS), a new service for its BioTech Virtual Power Center, at http://www.mptbiotech.com. SMS is a collection of more than 50 JavaScript programs supporting short DNA and protein sequence generation, format conversion, and analysis, the company said. It is available free of charge for an introductory period.
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Sean Ekins has joined Arnold Consultancy and Technology, a pharmaceutical consulting firm based in New York, as senior vice president of computational biology. Ekins most recently served as vice president for computational biology at GeneGo. Prior to that, he was associate director for computational drug discovery at Concurrent Pharmaceuticals. Ekins holds a PhD from the University of Aberdeen in the UK.