Virtual Genetics of Sweden has released version 1 of Virtual Predict, a data mining platform that uses inductive language programming for the discovery of expert rules that describe significant patterns in biological data.
Genomatix, based in Munich, Germany, is releasing its MatInspector professional software for free to academic researchers. MatInspector identifies transcription factor binding sites in genomic DNA.
Features of MatInspector professional include an extended and reorganized matrix library, individually optimized matrix similarity thresholds for all matrices, grouping of functionally similar matrices into families, reduction of false positive matches, and user-defined matrix subsets that can be saved for subsequent analyses.
James McInerney of the Bioinformatics and Pharmacogenomics Laboratory at the National University of Ireland has released an updated version of his codon usage program GCUA at http://bioinf. may.ie /gcua/index.html.
GCUA performs codon usage analyses, such as counting codons and analyzing base composition, and can also be used to analyze the codon and amino acid composition of genomes. The current version is formatted for a maximum of 50,000 genes.