MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Silicon Graphics has released over the internet two bioinformatics software tools, Parallel Clustal W and High-Throughput Blast, free to the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. The programs are designed for Silicon Graphics Origin servers.
High-Throughput Blast accelerates the comparison of large numbers of sequences to multiple databases. It supports all versions of Blast software designed and distributed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information as well as Blast software version 1.4 developed by Warren Gish of Washington University. Parallel Clustal W software speeds the building of large multiple sequence alignments. It is maintained and developed by Julie Thompson and Toby Gibson of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, and Des Higgins of the University of County Cork. Both tools are available at Silicon Graphics' website at http://www.sgi.com/chembio/resources.
Silicon Graphics also announced last month that it has extended its visual datamining software, MineSet, to Windows users. The general-use software is used for genomics research by organizations such as Monsanto. MineSet 3.0 Enterprise Edition will allow companies to accelerate their knowledge discovery processes by expanding the number of users to include those on Windows NT platforms, the company said. The new edition provides connectivity with all leading Open Database
Connectivity-compatible databases, including SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, and Informix. MineSet 3.0 also provides a capability for visualization tools to be easily converted to ActiveX components, enabling independent software vendors and customers to create custom solutions running on the Windows platform.