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There is a revolution occurring in biology. Advances in technology
have moved molecular biology from the study of the regulation of
single genes to the study of coordinated regulation of thousands
of genes. These advances have also made it possible to catalog all
the genes present in an organism - the genome - as well as all of
the proteins expressed in a specific cell type - the proteome.
The collection, storage and analysis of these massive data sets
have created new and daunting tasks for the life scientist. As
new technologies, such as microarrays, make data collection much
more prolific, the challenge for the scientist has in large part
moved from the collection of data to the management and analysis
of that data. Solutions that worked with data sets containing
10 or even 100 data points will fail when confronted with data
sets containing ten thousand, one million or more data points.
Current spreadsheet-based methods designed to analyze one thousand
samples will fail when confronted with these massive data sets.
In order to succeed scientists are going to have to adopt new
software and hardware standards.
The science and bioinformatics staff at VizX Labs believes that
those solutions will embrace web-based systems for the design
of microarray experiments and analysis of scientific data that
will give scientists tools to quickly search, analyze and mine
information from millions of data points. These tools need to
overcome three distinct problems created by the availability of
such large sets of biological data.
- Scale - the solution must be able to deal with extremely
large data sets and be scalable in response to continually increasing
amounts of data.
- Speed - rapid analysis of data will increase productivity.
- Flexibility - scientists must be able to deal with
the diversity of standards of data and must allow for relationships
between diverse data sets.
VizX Labs is preparing a suite of Web-based software applications,
which will meet these challenges and address this critical market
need for microarray preparation and analysis software that combines
power with convenience. Led by VizX's first product, GeneSifter™,
and enabled by an underlying data management system, they will
give scientists new tools with which to meet the challenge of
bioinformatics. |
