INDUSTRY

Research on disease processes will accelerate with a multi-purpose protein database launched by the University of Michigan. This tool will help biomedical scientists digest the data being produced by modern biotechnology. This database, called Michigan Molecular Interactions (MiMI) index, is designed to gather data from multiple well-known protein interaction repositories and to merge the information to create a new database using computational technology. Using MiMI, scientists can access information about protein processes and rapidly dig down to primary source data. University says, biomedical scientists today often find valuable information in multiple data sources. When they visit these multiple websites and download data, they find that much of it is overlapping, and some is even contradictory. MiMI brings all these independent data together to form a complete picture of the protein interactions. “If you want to examine a single protein, you could visit ten independent websites and then synthesize the information,” says Hosagrahar V. Jagadish, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering and computer science, College of Engineering, who led the development of the deep integration technology underlying the MiMI database. “If you want to select one target among a set of 200 proteins, you can do it in half a day using MiMI or 200 half days if you do it manually, the old way. With MiMI, the information from the multiple sites are available and are integrated for you into a single database.” MiMI is hosted by the Michigan National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI), one of seven National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap centers for biomedical computation. Further Information: its Web site.