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Automatic extraction of gene/protein biological functions from biomedical text

With the rapid advancement of biomedical science and the development of high-throughput analysis methods, the extraction of various types of information from biomedical text has become critical. Since automatic functional annotations of genes are quite useful for interpreting large amounts of high-throughput data efficiently, the demand for automatic extraction of information related to gene func...

Plants defy Mendel's inheritance laws, may prompt textbook changes

Contrary to inheritance laws the scientific world has accepted for more than 100 years, some plants revert to normal traits carried by their grandparents, bypassing genetic abnormalities carried by both parents. These mutant parent plants apparently have hidden templates containing genetic information from the preceding generation that can be transferred to their offspring, even though the...

Software Tool for Converting Scientific Text into a Database of Functional Relationships

Ariadne Genomics, Inc. today announced the launch of MedScan?Text-to-Knowledge Suite 2.0, a Natural Language Processing-based tool for automated extraction of biological facts from scientific literature, MEDLINE abstracts, and other text sources. A demo version of MedScan is available at www.ariadnegenomics.com. MedScan leverages hand-crafted dictionaries of protein and chemical names, and...

Comprehensive biodefense text published

A new book, Biological Weapons Defense: Infectious Disease and Counterbioterrorism, deals with the intentional causality of disease. Published by Humana Press, this text is also available in e-Book. Many of the contributors come from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), the nation's premier biodefense laboratory. In this 624-page, hardcover text edite...

Building a protein name dictionary from full text: a machine learning term extraction approach

The majority of information in the biological literature resides in full text articles, instead of abstracts. Yet, abstracts remain the focus of many publicly available literature data mining tools. Most literature mining tools rely on pre-existing lexicons of biological names, often extracted from curated gene or protein databases. This is a limitation, because such databases have low coverage o...

Microbiology text tells stories, offers online resources

A new general microbiology textbook aimed at undergraduate students comes with not one, but two online resources. Written by eminent scientists with practical teaching, textbook writing and research experience, Microbe, will engage students in the learning process with its clear, reader-friendly style and a unique perspective of the field. "Our working plan has been to emphasize concepts...

Mayo Clinic collaboration mining of ancient herbal text leads to potential new anti-bacterial drug

A unique Mayo Clinic collaboration has revived the healing wisdom of Pacific Island cultures by testing a therapeutic plant extract described in a 17th century Dutch herbal text for its anti-bacterial properties. Early results show that extracts from the Atun tree effectively control bacteria that can cause diarrhea, as claimed by naturalist Georg Eberhard Rumpf, circa 1650. He documented his tra...

Tiny bones rewrite textbooks

Small but remarkable fossils found in New Zealand will prompt a major rewrite of prehistory textbooks, showing for the first time that the so-called "land of birds" was once home to mammals as well. The tiny fossilised bones - part of a jaw and a leg - belonged to a unique, mouse-sized land animal unlike any other mammal known. They were unearthed from the rich St Bathans fossil bed, in th...

Nanotextured implant materials: blending in, not fighting back

Biomedical engineers are constantly coming up with ways to repair the human body, replacing defective and worn out parts with plastic, titanium, and ceramic substitutes ?but the body does not always accept such substitutes seamlessly. Engineers from Brown and Purdue universities have found that simply changing the surface texture of implants can dramatically change the way cells colonize a wide v...