Chemistry Central Blog
New, free-to-access life sciences search engine
A new, free-to-access life sciences search engine has been recently made available to the general public. NextBio allows users to search over 10,000 public experimental results, 1.2 billion data points, and 16 million PubMed literature abstracts, making "massive amounts of disparate biological, clinical and chemical data from public and proprietary sources searchable, regardless of data type and origin....".
The search engine's framework, which connects heterogeneous data and textual information, was previously only provided in an "enterprise version" for life science R&D and drug development, with notable users including Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development. The "enterprise accounts" differ from the free version in that they include "added data integration services, security and support".
The research areas covered by NextBio's publicly searchable data range from pharmacogenomics to oncology. Functionality exists to allow users to import their own analysed experimental results, where they can choose to share their data with the network or restrict access to a limited audience. Users can also create their own profiles to more easily develop collaborations with other scientists.
NextBio's founders state that it
"...provides a unique opportunity for the research
community to collaborate through information sharing and to perform an important
part of their biological work in silico... [allowing users]... to glean new
insights into gene function, disease progression and compound effects, as well
as into their own studies using the world's quality public experiments..."
There
are plans to incorporate further content into the platform in due course, such as
sequence-centric and phenotypic data types. Helpful and informative video demonstrations can be found on the site, offering an overview of the initiative's "open biology" ethos, as well as a tutorial on how to use the search engine.
Posted by Gino D'Oca at 16:19 Comments (0)
