Clusterall will enable researchers to identify and characterize gene expression profiles in tissues from various organisms in different developmental and environmental states. Clusterall will fulfill the need in the genetics research community for a series of comprehensive, non-redundant and accessible gene databases that enable and accelerate new gene discovery, drug target identification, and studies of development and alternative gene expression.
The Clusterall data sets will be available on Entigen’s on-line BioNavigator Bioinformatics Workspace and will be enhanced with a rational organization structure and functional gene annotations. For researchers, access to Clusterall via BioNavigator will take the place of the time consuming, expensive and computationally inefficient practice of building project specific gene databases on a one-off basis.
Clusterall will be created using mRNA, expressed sequence tag (EST), and predicted gene sequence data, and computer algorithms which mask irrelevant data and assemble and link gene sequences, said SANBI director Dr Winston Hide.
The result will be an annotated database of genes that’s ten times smaller than the combined data sources it was derived from, with inaccuracies, redundancies, and non-gene sequence data selectively removed. With the condensed database, researchers can use more rigorous gene analysis algorithms, locate novel gene variants more easily, and work much faster. added Dr Hide.
Dr Tim Littlejohn, founder and CSO of Entigen, said to the press: Through BioNavigator, Entigen provides bioinformatics resources usually found only in the world’s largest genome research facilities to individual researchers with ordinary budgets. Those researchers do not have routine access to the up to date data resources, sophisticated software licenses, and computer processing power required to reduce and assemble hundreds of millions of sequence entries down to a useful and accessible gene database. Our Clusterall collaboration with SANBI will provide global access to current gene databases, for a variety of organisms, to those researchers at very reasonable cost, inside the BioNavigator Bioinformatics Workspace.
