Autogen promises free access to gene search tool

A bioinformatics tool developed by Melbourne company Autogen to search public domain gene databases for specific genes of interest will be made available to academic researchers for free.

Details of the GeneSniffer program, developed by International Diabetes Institute and Autogen scientists Dr Kate Elliott and Dr Jeremy Jowett, were released at the Australasian Gene Mappers Association conference held in Tasmania last week.

"We wanted to provide it to other researchers to boost gene mapping research," Jowett said.

The company is not planning to make the code for the program available, but will run search requests for researchers and provide information back to them.

Jowett explained that program was basically a data-mining tool that goes online and searches for information about genes in specific chromosomal regions. It requires information about the chromosomal region of interest and keywords, such as a disease name, to narrow down the genes of interest. The output of the program is a ranked table of genes reported in the literature as being involved in the disease.

He said that the program took one to two days to run, compared with the two weeks typically required for a manual search of each database. "It's making in the order of 50,000 requests to the databases," he said.

"It's a way to hunt through the maze of genes," said Autogen CEO Prof Greg Collier.

According to Jowett, Elliott spent about six months developing the program. "It's still a work in progress but it's got to the point where it is pretty useful," he said. "It provides another tool to use in a gene selection program."

But Jowett said that if nothing were known about a gene other than its sequence, then the program wouldn't find it.

The response from gene mapping scientists at the conference was very positive, Jowett said.