Abcam, a bioscience company specialising in the supply of antibodies from a web-based catalogue and Transinsight, a specialist in semantic search technologies announced a collaboration in the field of protein information quality control using bioinformatics workflows.

Accurately compiling all the required information around antibody targets is a challenging task, which has created the requirement for an automated intelligent computer-based solution to ensure top-quality information content about proteins. For example, an average human gene name has 6 or 7 synonyms and many more spelling variants. Hand-curated databases do not cover all possible ways of naming and spelling genes and hand-curation is a tedious, error prone and labour-intensive task.

"Until recently there were only limited software tools and scientific workflows available to help us automatically produce high quality data sets surrounding each of Abcam’s thousands of antibody targets. We need these data sets to help our customers find the right products", says Dr. Harter, Senior Business Development Manager at Abcam. Harter continues "We were looking for solutions for supporting our team of experts and were impressed by the advanced technologies of Transinsight. The fact that the company operates the semantic search engine GoPubMed.org and has extensive bioinformatics and protein databases expertise made the decision to work with Transinsight easy."

The award winning technology behind GoPubMed fully automates very difficult analyses normally done by scientists with equal or better performance, predicting the necessary information by sophisticated algorithms. "It is good to see how we can significantly enhance our customers' performance by improving their data quality and thus freeing their staff from an unnecessary burden" says Michael R. Alvers, CEO at Transinsight.

About Abcam
Abcam plc is a producer and distributor of research-grade antibodies and associated products headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with a US office located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Japan office located in Tokyo. The Company produces and distributes its own and third party produced antibodies to academic and commercial customers throughout the world with product information and ordering available through the Company’s website, www.abcam.com. Abcam’s vision is to build the largest online catalogue of the best antibodies in the world.

About Transinsight
Transinsight develops knowledge-based semantic solutions in the Life Sciences. Their flagship products www.Go3R.org and www.GoPubMed.com, renowned biomedical search engines, are the first knowledge-based search systems of the next generation for the Life Sciences on the internet. In acknowledgement of the technologies developed by the company, Transinsight has repeatedly been honoured with international awards. The firm works in close collaboration with the Dresden University of Technology. Selected customers are: Unilever, BASF, BfR, StatoilHydro, Wintershall, Abcam and EMBL. For further information on Transinsight on the internet, see www.transinsight.com.