Launch Of Mascot Protein Identification Software
Imperial Cancer Research Fund research is to be made freely available on the world-wide web with the launch of new software produced by Matrix Science Ltd.
Matrix Science, the London-based bioinformatics company, in collaboration with the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, has launched Mascot, a powerful search engine which uses mass spectrometry data to identify proteins from primary sequence databases.
Mascot, which represents a great leap forward in the field of protein sequence software, will be freely available on the world-wide web – it can also be purchased for in-house use, with a share of the profits going to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. The software combines all proven methods of searching, including peptide mass fingerprint, sequence query and MS/MS ions search.
John Cottrell, a director of Matrix Science, said: "Mass spectrometry is now the principal method for the characterisation of proteins. Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies need to identify very large numbers of protein samples at high speed and with minimum cost. This demand will mushroom as proteomics moves out of the research laboratory and into clinical applications."
"The process of screening mass spectrometry data against the hundreds of thousands of entries in the major sequence databases has proved to be a major bottleneck. Mascot aims to eliminate this bottleneck through greater processing speed, increased functionality, and novel, probability-based algorithms which allow the identification process to be fully automated."
Matrix Science Ltd has taken the software devised by Dr Darryl Pappin, head of the Protein Sequencing Laboratory at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, and developed it as a product which can be used by academics and researchers around the world. Researchers can gain free, unrestricted access to Mascot through the Matrix Science web site (www.matrixscience.com)
Dr Pappin said: "It’s crucial that cancer research scientists can rapidly characterise the proteins that are involved in the different forms of cancer. By understanding the structure of these proteins we may be able to design and target anti-cancer drugs more effectively. It is important to an institution like Imperial Cancer Research Fund that such software is made freely available to other researchers around the world."