INDUSTRY

Massively Parallel Technologies (MPT), a provider of on-demand high-performance computing, announced MPT’s BioTech Virtual Power Center (VPC) has added Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) support for the complete UniGene library. The Uniprot/TrEMBL, environmental, transcript reference and PDB libraries, along with other genomic and protein databases, also have been made available to the MPT BLAST community. Users of MPT’s BLAST benefit from tremendous speedup in time to answers for large BLAST jobs, and now have the ability to search against libraries from both NCBI and EBI at one location, taking researchers beyond standard NCBI BLAST capabilities. According to Kevin Howard, MPT Chief Technology Officer, “BLAST is an early but important step in the drug discovery and development life cycle. We are committed to offering the widest range of BLAST databases to the bioinformatics research community. Combined with our high-performance version of NCBI BLAST, users of MPT’s BioTech Virtual Power Center will experience new biological insights at a faster rate.” MPT will continue to add and maintain databases to its BLAST repository, as well as continue to enhance its BLAST and Biotech VPC offerings. New database support requests can be submitted directly on the MPT Biotech VPC website, located at its Web site.