Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Moxtek, a nano-photonics company, today announced that it has reached a collaboration agreement with Philips Research to develop a new wire grid microarray chip (WGM) that has been designed to offer ultra-high surface specificity and excellent suppression of background signals. The WGM is based on a wire grid pattern on a glass substrate. The WGM technology provides the potential for rapid quantitative detection with improved accuracy, of biomolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. In addition, the technology promises to significantly simplify the work flow and improve the reproducibility for such tests by removing the washing step and performing hybridization and detection in parallel. These strengths match with the needs for advanced microarray technology in life sciences research. Rapid molecular detection for life sciences research is a fast-growing market, and could revolution...

Last week the XTractor Premium Knowledgebase has clocked 150,000 manually categorized biomedical facts. The knowledgebase currently grows at a rate of more than 700 facts every single day from PubMed and covers information on Biomarkers , Disease mechanisms, Clinical Trials, polymorphisms , mutations , knockouts and pathways . The knowledgebase recently crossed landmark of more 10000 relationships on knockout and mutation studies alone in XTractor. Knockout/Knockdown related facts: 10132 Mutation related facts: 14331 So not only you get the most relavant scientific facts everyday but also individual uptodate knowledge on knockouts, mutations, biomarkers , SNP and so on… XTractor Premium - A Platform for discovery , analysis and modelling of published biomedical facts. The only Knowledgebase which provides "manually" annotated facts from PubMed on a weekly basis Innovative Features like Semantic Search , Concept Linking , Bibliographic search , Save, Export a...

Life sciences informatics company Molecular Connections , India, has announced the availability of XTractor Premium, a knowledge management platform, for the biomedical research community. The product is projected to provide scientists with new and refined ways to access the latest scientific facts from PubMed. Pharmaceutical companies, researchers and scientists can use the platform to identify, verify and develop predictive relationships from PubMed Literature. Leveraging the ability to transform data to knowledge and to assist experts is seen to be crucial to the success of research investigation today. XTractor Premium offers several enhancements over the beta version in managing large volume of published biomedical data to accelerate decision making. The XTractor knowledgebase currently contains 150,000 relationships on biomarkers, clinical trials, pathways, knockout studies, mutations, drug interactions and disease mechanisms. The knowledgebase is updated everyday with manually a...

Qiagen has announced that two of its tests can be used to screen for the swine flu virus. Data analysis of the viral gene sequences showed that the artus Influenza LC RT PCR Kit and the Resplex II 2.0 Kit, can be used to detect whether or not Influenza A virus sequences are present in a sample, including the H1N1 subtype. If the sample proves positive, treatment with medication such as Tamiflu or Relenza can be prescribed, according to the recommendations given by the corresponding drug manufacturers. "We have compared the swine fever virus' sequence with our assays. The primers, which define the starting and end points of a genetic sequence that is amplified to make the target sequence visible, match 100 percent for the artus kit and almost 100 percent for the Resplex kit", said Dr Thomas Grewing, senior director, R&D. "We are now working closely with reference institutions to have both assays further re-validated and optimized based on clinical samples". B...

XTractor Premium - a platform for discovery, analysis and modelling of published biomedical facts. The application also comes with -XTractor Premium Knowledgebase - the only knowledgebase, which provides "manually" annotated facts from PubMed on a daily basis.The XTractor Premium Knowledgebase now has more than 150000 relationships. TAGS: text mining, manual annotation, data alerts, pubmed, genes, drugs, processes, diseases, free, data mining, tag, drug discovery, web 2.0, natural language processing, data analysis, visualization, concept linking, abstraction, precision, recall, data accuracy, proteins, interactions, index, query, MeSH, NLM, manual curation, protein interactions, abstraction, abstracts, accuracy, accurate, data, annotations, biological process, biomedical literature, categorization, colloborations, concept linking, curate, curation, data accuracy, data alerts, literature, categorization, colloborations, concept linking curate curation data accuracy data ale...