Insilicos releases peptide search engine
Performance of MR-Tandem on a Hadoop cluster processing a large test file.
Seattle, 30 March, 2011 - Insilicos today announced the first official release of MR-Tandem, a highly-scalable peptide search engine based on the popular X!Tandem program. MR-Tandem is available for free at insilicos.com/products/mr-tandem
Peptide search engines are used in proteomics research with mass spectrometry data, to identify proteins in biological samples. X!Tandem is one of the leading peptide search engines, and the most popular open-source peptide search tool.
"Peptide search typically requires a computer cluster costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars," said Insilicos VP of Informatics Brian Pratt. "As the cost of lab work falls, computation becomes the cost and time bottleneck. We developed MR-Tandem to allow researchers who don't have their own computer cluster to do proteomics computational analysis inexpensively, using cloud computing."
MR-Tandem employs the Hadoop framework to use literally hundreds of inexpensive cloud computing instances, allowing results to be obtained both quickly and inexpensively. This efficiency is particularly important when many post-translational modifications must be considered. "Post-translational modifications make the search task so much bigger," said Insilicos President Erik Nilsson. "We think biologists may be under-searching their data, simply because they lack the resources for a more thorough search. By making search more accessible, MR-Tandem will help us find out if there are valuable discoveries hidden in the proteomics data researchers have already collected."
Insilicos LLC is a biomarker analytics company based in Seattle.
For more information, visit the Insilicos web site www.insilicos.com or contact Insilicos at info@insilicos.com. 'Insilicos' 'PreClue," and 'Life Science Software' are trademarks of Insilicos LLC.
