OAKLAND, Calif.--Pangea Systems completed its collaboration with Roche Bioscience for the design of expression chips from expressed sequence tagged databases. The system uses bioinformatics tools that will be available within Pangea's GeneWorld. The collaboration allowed the efficient design of DNA chips for gene families for therapeutic and diagnostic interest. Roche Senior Vice-President Robert Booth said, "With the help of Pangea's chip design software, we are able to detect previously unknown gene family members."
Pangea CEO John Couch said his firm's collaboration with Roche demonstrates the benefit of bringing information technology and biological research together to develop diagnostics and cures for diseases in less time.
Pangea's new software automatically segregates and classifies gene isoforms and polymorphisms that may be linked to disease so that chip designs are complete and of a high quality. Other components of the system provide validation and protection from artifacts such as chimerism and contamination inherent in EST data. The combined system allows the construction of chip design sets from incomplete, fragmented, and error-prone EST data and full-length sequences from both public and proprietary databases.