DoubleTwist.com, a portal site created by Pangea Systems aims to bring the Internet back to its roots -- back to the days when the Net was primarily used by scientists and researchers sharing ideas and data.
"There's all this public data out there right now," said Rob Williamson, senior vice president of marketing. "We're consolidating it, cleaning it up and handing it to the scientists on a silver platter."
DoubleTwist.com lets scientists type in a genetic sequence then serves up all known information about that sequence. It also features a human genome analysis agent that provides information about genomic sequences that are similar to what a scientist is studying. Scientists and researchers will be notified by e-mail when new information about their area of study is released.
"What used to take people several years to research, now just takes over night," said Williamson.
Sifting through the data
DoubleTwist.com is currently being beta tested by researchers at Stanford University. It will be officially opened up for public use in January. The majority of the site's features will be free, however Pangea Systems does plan to offer "power user subscriptions" for a fee for scientists that require a high number of computations. Pangea will use technology it has already developed in its role as a provider of bioinformatics software to power the DoubleTwist site. Bioinformatics is the application of information technology to life science research and development.
"We want to unlock the power of the human genome project," explained John Couch, CEO of Pangea Systems. "We've done it for big corporations and now we're going to turn it on for the world."
The goal of DoubleTwist.com is to sort through the immense amounts of public genetic data and provide scientists with only the information that is relevant to them. For small research facilities that don't have access to expensive data processing tools, searching for information on a specific genetic sequence is like looking for the ever-elusive needle in a haystack and already-discovered information tends to get lost and fall through the cracks.
