NEWS BRIEFS
Ottawa, CANADA — AMITA Corporation, a leader in database development, officially released its white paper Database Mining in the Human Genome Initiative. It provides a summary of research to date as well as identifies future research trends in genomics.
The Human Genome Initiative is an international research program for the creation of detailed genetic and physical maps of the human genome. As recently announced, the first step of the project – sequencing the genome – is almost complete. The next question now arises – what to do with the enormous amount of data? As Sonny Lundahl managing partner of AMITA states “The scientific community is close to reaching the end of phase one, but now the work begins for the technology community – creating methods to analyze this data.”
There are approximately three billion chemical letters that make up the human genome. Data mining involves organizing and analyzing data to achieve the insight required for practical applications such as medical advancements.
Data mining presents a great opportunity for Canada in the field of bioinformatics. Dr. Tom Hudson, director of the Montreal Genome Centre and assistant director of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Centre for Genome Research, says “… Canada has been fortunate to recruit several leaders in bioinformatics in the past few years. Together with the strong talent pool of computer scientists coming out of Canadian universities, we have the essential components for bioinformatics – people.”
In the tradition of open source software, the white paper is available on the Internet at http://www.biodatabases.com/whitepaper.html . The concept is quite simple – by placing software on the Internet for people to view and update, it evolves. As Sonny Lundahl explains “Very often a white paper becomes obsolete within weeks of being published. By posting it on the web, we are encouraging updates and comments from the genetic community. We want this document to become a living, breathing tool that we can use to shape the field of database mining in genome research.”
Biodatabases.com is a project of AMITA Corporation. AMITA is one of the first dedicated database developers for the Human Genome Initiative.
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