NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – NextBio has won a Small Business Innovation Research grant to incorporate genomic and proteomic information for vertebrates and plants in its data search and discovery platform, the company said today.
The firm will use the two-year, $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop the software for searching, discovering, and sharing information found in public and proprietary databases. NextBio will incorporate information from vertebrate organisms and about Arabidopsis, corn, rice, and soy plant genomics in its cross-species platform.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based company said it will develop ontologies, translational methodology, and cross-study comparison tools to connect findings from studies of different organisms, and it will develop new statistical and visualization methods to correlate and interpret the data.
The new information will be added to NextBio's collection of data from human, mouse, rat, fly, worm, and yeast systems.
"Life science researchers use critical biological information from studies of diverse species to make key correlations that help them discover new knowledge about human or plant physiology and disease," NextBio CEO Saeid Akhtari said in a statement.
He said the grant will help the company extend the software to help "researchers leverage a wider range of data from model organisms to better understand biology."