Friday, May 29, 2009

New Microarray Technology

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 revolutionize healthcare research.

The WGM is based on illumination of a grid of metal nanowires with polarized excitation light and detecting the fluorescence generated by fluorescently labeled target molecules bound to capture probes on the substrate between the metal nanowires. The detection volume is limited to ~20 nm above the surface, and can be controlled via the dimensions of the nanowires and the excitation wavelength. The surface specific detection of the WGM provides a significant reduction in microarray workflow by making redundant the chip washing step; moreover, it has been shown to allow monitoring the binding of bio-molecules to the substrate in real-time.

Control of the polarization state enables using the wire grid microarray concept for both highly surface specific measurements and “conventional” measurements where the measurement volume is determined by the optical set-up rather than the geometry of the wire grid. This versatile technique has been designed to be compatible with commercial optical microarray readers currently available on the market.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The Perfect database to consult for SNP, Knockout/Knockdown related studies

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…

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Wednesday, May 6, 2009

XTractor Premium for scientists to access data stored in PubMed says Knowledgespeak

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 annotated relationships from the latest PUBMED publications. Other premium features include semantic search functionality; concept linking; bibliographic search; and the option to save and export data in user-friendly formats.

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Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Qiagen Provides Solutions for Swine Flu Surveillance

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".

Both test kits are for research use only. They have not been cleared or approved by authorities including the United States Food and Drug Administration or any other regulatory agency in the United States, or under the European IVD Directive, for human diagnostic or other clinical use, and are not intended and should not be used for human diagnostic or any other clinical purposes.


XTractor Premium - A Platform for discovery, analysis and modelling of published biomedical facts.









The XTractor Premium Knowledgebase surpasses 150000 mark

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.

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XTractor Premium - A Platform for discovery, analysis and modelling of published biomedical facts.