CLONTECH Laboratories, Inc. is a biotechnology company located in Palo Alto, California. CLONTECH’s mission is to help accelerate the discovery process by pioneering tools that enable researchers to ask new questions and investigate ever more complex systems than was previously possible. CLONTECH was the first to make available several key technologies: GFP-based (green fluorescent protein) reporters; two-hybrid analysis systems for studying protein interactions; and gene array technology for high-throughput differential expression analysis.
At CLONTECH, TextAnalyst has been primarily used in addressing problems related to gene expression analysis, which is part of the fast growing branch of biological science called genomics. After the human genome has been sequenced, which is projected to be accomplished in few years, even more challenging problems of human genetics lay ahead. One of them is understanding of function and role of each gene product in the living cell. The most comprehensive and easily accessible sources of information about it, which is at the same time the one most difficult to query, is the scientific publications. TextAnalyst provides efficient and accurate ways to access very large volumes of information, making compact representation of the facts found in scientific journals.
TextAnalyst 1.0 is a stand-alone software application capable of extracting information from plain English text, and relating the information to semantically significant terms. One of the most attractive features of TextAnalyst is that it creates an adjustable semantic net between all the semantic elements based on calculated weights of semantic elements and relations. The ability of automated abstracting of texts is also a plus.
TextAnalyst has the ability to present a large volume of specialized scientific text in a compressed form, which is extremely valuable for researchers. TextAnalyst also provides quantification of relations between the data, which is potentially useful for creating relational databases. Due to overwhelming number of facts and terms biologists deal with, it is important to find alternative ways to retrieve information, and present it in a more useful form.
TextAnalyst represents semantic terms extracted from text in the form of text-based tables. A graphical interface showing relations between the terms would be extremely helpful in reviewing the results.
TextAnalyst has been selected as the only text analysis tool capable of establishing relations between terms. It is reasonably priced, easy to install and operate.
TextAnalyst is used by CLONTECH scientists working in the field of bioinformatics as a part of the cDNA array project. It enables users to provide functional descriptions for a large number of genes subjected to expression analysis.
I found Megaputer Intelligence support to be professional, friendly, and comprehensive.
Web site documentation reflects the main features of the product. I found the help files to be helpful, but a bit brief in describing details.
Nikolai Kalnin, Ph.D.
Team Leader, Bioinformatics Group
Takara Bio Inc. (formerly CLONTECH Laboratories Inc.)
https://www.takarabio.com