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May 21, 2001

Editor: Karyl Scott (kscott@cmp.com)

Genetic Gold Mine
Biologists in Norway are using a computer program to automatically search and mine data from the vast collection of biological literature found on the Internet. It's one of the first steps in the development of an intelligent application that can read and correlate the enormous catalog of scientific literature to help derive genetic interactions. Much of the published biomedical knowledge is recorded in text form and hasn't been subjected to rigorous computerized analysis. As such, there's a large pool of highly valuable, but often underused, information. That's why researchers at the Norwegian Radium Hospital in Norway were inspired to create Web-based search and extraction methods that can sift through this gold mine of biomedical knowledge.

The data-mining software, called PubGene, reads the scientific literature and electronically catalogs it. Eivind Hovig of the Norwegian Radium Hospital and his fellow researchers say taking advantage of the voluminous information available on the Internet will help speed genetic discoveries.

Researchers using PubGene collected data from more than 10 million gene and text databases from Medline, a service of the National Library of Medicine, to identify 3,712 named human genes and look for correlations among them. The way the software works, if two genes are mentioned in a particular document, the PubGene application will assume they're related. The software also looks for associations among genes by correlating the medical subject heading index with the terms from the gene ontology database.The PubGene application, or, more likely, its successors, may one day be able to acquire genomic data much more quickly and apply that knowledge with a greater degree of accuracy than human researchers.

--Ron Copeland (rcopelan@cmp.com)

Storage On Your Key Chain
Because most companies would like their mobile employees to take backup seriously, they can now make the process as simple for employees as carrying a key chain. That's all the DiskOnKey product from M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers Ltd. needs to take your megabytes mobile. DiskOnKey is the size of a pen with a loop to attach to a key chain. The device has an embedded microprocessor and an operating system that provides enough intelligence for it to perform autodiscovery, which will identify it to any notebook computer and vice versa. Users need only plug DiskOnKey into an available USB port as they would a mouse or monitor attachment. "This is the only device for the professional who has a PowerPoint presentation, an Excel spreadsheet, and Word files," says industry analyst Ben Thompson at Gartner. "DiskOnKey will let the professional plug into anyone's laptop and go to work."

--Martin J. Garvey (mgarvey@cmp.com)

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