Ariadne Genomics, AAAS Agreement Creates Better Ways for Researchers to Manipulate Data for Potential Therapeutic Benefit

Ariadne Genomics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today announced a licensing and distribution agreement that allows data from leading researchers on how cells talk to each other through chemical signals as they adapt to changes in their environment to be merged with analytical software that can reveal a greater understanding of why these changes occur and their potential importance to developing disease therapies.

Rockville, MD (PRWEB) June 29, 2005 -– Ariadne Genomics and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today announced a licensing and distribution agreement that allows data from leading researchers on how cells talk to each other through chemical signals as they adapt to changes in their environment to be merged with analytical software that can reveal a greater understanding of why these changes occur and their potential importance to developing disease therapies.

AAAS, publisher of the journal Science, developed the Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment, an enhanced online journal, known as Science's STKE, that also functions as an electronic resource enabling scientists, researchers, students and educators to find, organize, and use information relevant to cell regulation processes. Leading authorities enter their knowledge about cell signaling into the Connections Maps database, which includes information on signaling components and their relationships organized into pathways. This information is freely accessible through a graphical interface at the STKE Web site and includes selected citations and authorities' evaluations of the strength of the evidence for associations within the database.

The software suites developed by Ariadne Genomics -- PathwayAssist and PathwayStudio® Central -- will allow additional types of analysis of the Connections Maps pathway data and will provide tools for biomedical and basic science researchers to interpret their data within a biologically meaningful context. These include interpretation of microarray data for changes in gene expression. Currently the STKE Connections Maps database contains 62 pathways and thousands of components and relations that span all types of organisms, from plants to yeast to humans.

The STKE database is a great addition to PathwayAssist's own databases for anyone who needs access to complete signal transduction knowledge,” said Michael Seewald, bioinformatician, Bayer Healthcare AG, Wuppertal, Germany. PathwayAssist has become one of the most essential research tools. Its manually curated dictionaries and the MedScan algorithm allow the automatic generation of highly accurate disease-focused networks from literature. The digital representation of pathways as graphs is a great leap forward compared to the static and cartoon-like textbook pathways of the past.”

The STKE database complements pathway products by Ariadne Genomics: PathwayAssist desktop package and PathwayStudio® Central client-server software for visualization and analysis of biological pathways. Both products leverage Ariadne Genomics ResNet database of more than 500,000 functional relationships, and its MedScan module for automated extraction of functional relationships from scientific text. A shared goal of Science's STKE and Ariadne Genomics is to increase the likelihood of scientists making new connections between facts from discrete sources.

I have been a PathwayAssist user since its very first version," said Aura Perez, M.D., Ph.D., Department of Pediatrics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. "The ability to mine the myriad of functional relationships extracted from publications, and match the result to the change observed in ones experimental system, is of tremendous benefit to me. The addition of STKE signaling pathways curated by leading authorities in the field will reinforce tremendously what we can do with PathwayAssist. Im looking forward to seeing more and more curated pathways incorporated within the software.”

Signal transduction is the study of how cells respond and adapt to their environments through chemical signals. It is an intensely active field of biomedical research and is of interest to a broad array of scientists, including those who need to follow and apply findings even though their primary interest may not be in signal transduction mechanisms themselves. In 2004 alone, about 16,000 scientific articles were published in this field.

The STKE Connections Maps pathway collection will be offered to customers for an additional fee. More information about pathway products from Ariadne Genomics is available at www.ariadnegenomics.com/products. More information about the STKE Connections Maps database can be found at stke.sciencemag.org.

About AAAS
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal Science (www.sciencemag.org), Science's STKE (www.stke.org), and Science's SAGE KE (http://sageke.sciencemag.org). AAAS was founded in 1848, and serves some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. The nonprofit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy; international programs; science education; and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!, www.eurekalert.org, the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS.

About Ariadne Genomics
Ariadne Genomics is a Maryland-based company developing systems biology tools for life science research: PathwayStudio® Central client-server pathway analysis software, PathwayAssist desktop software for reconstruction, analysis and visualization of biological pathways; MedScan TextMiner, an automated scientific text processing tool; ResNet molecular networks database, created by automated extraction of biological facts from the entire PubMed, and Seqware personal sequence data management platform. More on Ariadne Genomics please find at www.ariadnegenomics.com.

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