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LONDON, In a move that reflects growing use of MASCOT(R) protein identification software, the National Institutes of Health, (NIH), one of the world's foremost medical research centres, has commissioned a central server for Matrix Science's market-leading proteomics package. Individual researchers within the NIH's 27 Institutes and Centres can now access this powerful resource to facilitate their proteomics research. Installing a shared MASCOT server was a logical move, since a number of individual Centres had begun to set up local servers. Ten NIH Institutes met last summer to discuss the feasibility of setting up a central server, under the auspices of the Center for Information Technology (CIT). The server, which is a cluster of high performance PC's running the Linux(TM) operating system, went live towards the end of 2002, and is already being accessed by over 100 different users, with more than 300 searches being completed each week. MASCOT Software is used for protein identification and characterisation by matching mass spectrometry data against protein or nucleic acid sequence databases. Many of the most popular sequence databases used for this purpose are actually compiled at the NIH by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. John Cottrell, co-founder of Matrix Science, said, "The initiative to set up this central resource is an endorsement of the growing importance of mass spectrometry based protein identification. We are very pleased that a growing community of NIH researchers will benefit from using MASCOT in their work."