Insilicos Publishes Paper on Cloud-based Peptide Search

Seattle, 18 January 2011 - Seattle biotech company Insilicos today announced that the journal Bioinformatics has published a paper on Insilicos' development of MR-Tandem, a cloud-based version of the popular, open-source X!Tandem peptide search engine. MR-Tandem uses the Hadoop Map-Reduce framework to create large virtual clusters, allowing researchers to quickly and inexpensively analyze large proteomics studies, even when many post-translational modifications must be considered.

"Up 'til now, proteomics researchers have either had to have an expensive computer cluster, or else confine themselves to small experiments," explains lead paper author and Insilicos VP of Informatics Brian Pratt. "What the community needed was an open-source peptide search engine that runs well in the cloud. So that's what we did."

"We just took a big capital expense out of large-scale proteomics," noted Insilicos President Erik Nilsson. "Don't have a million-dollar compute cluster at your beck and call? Now that isn't a problem."

The paper "MR-Tandem: Parallel X!Tandem using Hadoop MapReduce on Amazon Web Services" is available at http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/11/08/bioinformatics.btr615.abstract

MR-Tandem, full documentation, and a windows installer are available as part of the Insilicos Cloud Army project here.

MR-Tandem source code is available as part of the Sashimi project here. This work is funded in part by grant HG006091 from the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Insilicos LLC is a Seattle-based biomarker analytics and diagnostic development company. For more information, visit the Insilicos web site www.insilicos.com or contact Insilicos at info@insilicos.com. 'Insilicos,' 'PreClue,' 'Life Science Software,' and 'Cloud Army' are trademarks of Insilicos LLC.