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CellSpace Knowledge Miner
In recent years, burgeoning research in the field of life sciences has produced massive information overload. With the development of bibliographic databases, information retrieval is relatively easy, but capturing knowledge from the search results has become increasingly difficult. For example, if you want to know the major proteins or gene products involved in the biological process of apoptosis (cell death), a PubMed search of “apoptosis” will return a list of roughly 69,000 articles for the last 30 years. Deriving knowledge from this overwhelming amount of data is difficult and time consuming. In an effort to enhance the knowledge capture process from PubMed literature searches; HSLS has licensed CellSpace Knowledge Miner from Cellomics Inc. By using this tool in the previous example, a searcher would be able to find a list of proteins that co-occur with the term “apoptosis” in the research literature. In general, co-occurring terms have a biologically meaningful relationship. CellSpace is a bioinformatics tool— a knowledge mining system that automatically detects, analyzes, and reports the logical relationships between four types of terms found in the research literature:
CellSpace allows users to start with one or more molecules, functions, cells and systems, or organisms, and search for connections in any of the four categories. CellSpace is available via the HSLS molecular biology and genetics resources portal <www.hsls.pitt.edu/guides/genetics> listed under “Resource Highlights.” Access to CellSpace is limited to 8 simultaneous PC users (Mac OS is not supported) from UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh Oakland campus. --Ansuman Chattopadhyay |
