NCBI Taps OpenEye for PubChem Infrastructure
OpenEye Scientific Software said last week that the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information will use its cheminformatics toolkits to provide key infrastructure for the recently launched PubChem database of small organic molecules [BioInform 10-11-04].
Within PubChem, OpenEye’s OEChem toolkit is used for file input/output and molecular data handling, substructure pattern matching, stereochemistry and aromaticity perception, and valence bond canonicalization, among other things. In addition, the company’s OGHAM software is being used to assign correct IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) names to chemical structures, and will also be used to generate structures for the cases where the dataset has only names.
Future plans for PubChem include property predictions using additional software from OpenEye, the company said.
NEC Soft to Sell Proteome Analysis Software
NEC Soft said last week that it will begin marketing ProteoFinder, a proteome analysis software package, on Nov. 1.
The company said that the software uses a proprietary algorithm that can greatly speed up the proteome analysis process.
The software was co-developed by NEC Soft, the University of Tokushima, and a startup software company called BioSolution.
ProteoFinder will sell for ¥2 million ($18,182) for commercial use and ¥1.25 million ($11,364) for educational use.
NEC Soft said it expects to generate ¥200 million ($1.8 million) in sales of the product over the next three years.
Baylor to Use Partek Software
Partek said last week that it has licensed its Partek statistical software to Baylor University’s College of Medicine’s Microarray Core Facility.
Financial terms of the licensing agreement were not provided.
Infotrieve Acquires LabVelocity
Infotrieve said last week that it has acquired LIMS provider LabVelocity.
Financial terms of the agreement were not provided.
Infotrieve said it acquired the company to help integrate its line of scientific and technical literature with laboratory products. This process will begin by enabling links to research products in the “Materials and Methods” section of electronic journal articles, Infotrieve said. Researchers will be able to transfer product requests to their purchasing organizations or directly into their internal procurement systems.
LabVelocity’s products include ResearchLink Enterprise, a web-based lab productivity service; ProductManager, an interactive product catalog management and syndication tool; ProductListing, a product-listing service for product suppliers; WebManager, a website development solution; and Jellyfish, a DNA and protein sequence analysis software tool.
DoD Awards $4.9M to VBI for PathPort
The Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech University said last week that it has received $4.9 million from the US Department of Defense towards further development of PathPort, an informatics tool for gathering and analyzing information about pathogenic organisms.
VBI was awarded initial funding for the project in September, when it was tapped as the genomics and bioinformatics core for a 15-university biodefense research collaboration supported by a five-year, $350 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. [BioInform 09-15-03].
PathPort is an interoperability framework that provides access to biological characterizations of known pathogens, as well as tools to analyze and interpret the data, VBI said.