Information extraction technologies for the life science industry.

Access to relevant information and knowledge is essential for all steps of the drug discovery process. However, keeping track of relevant information in publications and patents becomes a real challenge for scientists and managers in industrial research. Computer-aided information extraction (IE) systems have been developed to support the work of scientists by extracting relevant information from scientific publications and presenting it in an aggregated, condensed form.

An infrastructure for comparative genomics to functionally characterize genes and proteins.

Current genome projects are resulting in a flood of sequence data. The interpretation of these sequences is lagging, and optimized data analysis strategies need to be developed. Much can be learned from comparing different genomes, as genomes of distant organisms may still encode proteins with high sequence similarity.

Comparative genomics of Listeria species.

Listeria monocytogenes is a food-borne pathogen with a high mortality rate that has also emerged as a paradigm for intracellular parasitism. We present and compare the genome sequences of L. monocytogenes (2,944,528 base pairs) and a nonpathogenic species, L.

The signal transducer gp130: solution structure of the carboxy-terminal domain of the cytokine receptor homology region.

The transmembrane glycoprotein gp130 is the common signal transducing receptor subunit of the interleukin-6-type cytokines. It is a member of the cytokine-receptor superfamily predicted to consist of six domains in its extracellular part. The second and third domain constitute the cytokine-binding module defined by a set of four conserved cysteines and a WSXWS motif, respectively.