Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

- GSK becomes first company to freely share chemical structures on 13,500 molecules from its compound library - Alliances formed with leading scientific research communities from private industry and public-domain data provider courtesy CDD Blog GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) had teamed up with leading public-domain data providers European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the US-based informatics service provider Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) to make freely available key scientific information on more than 13,500 compounds that could ultimately lead to new treatments for malaria. The release of this data marks the first time that a pharmaceutical company has made available the structures of so many compounds and is made possible through the collaboration of the web hosts and their specialist research tools, which will be available at no cost to researchers. The information, which is hosted on websites regularly used by researchers, incl...

OSDD is a CSIR-led Team India consortium with a global partnership. It's vision is to provide affordable healthcare to the developing world by providing a global platform where the best minds can collaborate & collectively endeavor to solve the complex problems associated with discovering novel therapies for neglected tropical diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, leishmaniasis, etc. It is a concept to collaboratively aggregate the biological and genetic information available to scientists in order to use it to hasten the discovery of drugs. This will provide a unique opportunity for scientists, doctors, technocrats, students and others with diverse expertise to work for a common cause.The OSDD Initiative Website www.osdd.net was launched on 15th September 2008 by...

In a paper called "Metagenome Annotation Using a Distributed Grid of Undergraduate Students" I just love this title! It's nerdy and cute, all at the same time. Says Sandra Porter . The paper describes a class where students from Marseilles University investigate the function of unidentified genes from a Global Ocean Sampling experiment. All the sequences are obtained from the environmental sequence division at the NCBI . French researchers describe their strategy for teaching undergraduate-level bioinformatics using cutting-edge genomic data and a Web-based learning tool. The students then annotated real metagenomic sequences from the Global Ocean Sampling experiment. "In return for their much-needed help sorting out oodles of DNA data, the undergrads gain a practical knowledge of the work involved in doing bioinformatics and metagenomics, and, most importantly of all, they get to experience what it's like to do real research," says Karen James at the Be...