• Astrogrid: a view through every telescope
• Open standard for algorithm development
• Bioinformatics market surges ahead
• Sea spray predicts storms
• Tripos announce drug discovery alliances
• Laboratory informatics improvement seminar
• IN BRIEF

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AstroGrid will enable astronomers to compare and manipulate a wide range of data

Astronomers throughout the UK now have a valuable new research tool at their disposal that may lead to new discoveries and improved understanding of the physics of the Universe. AstroGrid will enable astronomers to compare and manipulate a wide range of astronomical data, held anywhere on Earth, taken from both ground and space-based telescopes. This will open the way for virtual observing on individual computers.

AstroGrid provides a unique way of accessing, processing and storing astronomical data obtained from high quality observations of the cosmos not just from one telescope, but from all telescopes, including major new observational facilities, such as the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space-based observatory, which provide information across a wide range of the electro-magnetic spectrum, from radio to visible light to gamma rays.

Nic Walton, AstroGrid's project scientist, said: 'This first phase of the AstroGrid Virtual Observatory system represents a major milestone, unifying for the first time, the mass of astronomical data available to the astronomer, thus offering the potential to significantly increase the rate at which astronomers gain new insights into our Universe.'

AstroGrid makes use of the latest developments in distributed computing to enable the access and manipulation of large amounts of data. More importantly, it implements standards that it has agreed with other partner projects across the globe (through the International Virtual Observatory Alliance) in order to ensure that data from any telescope can be described and understood by automated systems, making large-scale analysis of the data on distributed computing systems much easier.

Professor Keith Mason, CEO of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, which funds AstroGrid, said: 'It is essential to compare and mix data from different sources in order to maximise the information we can glean from modern astronomical data. These tools will undoubtedly lead to new discoveries about the Universe that would have previously gone unnoticed.'

Many astronomers are now using the latest release of AstroGrid to address a number of astrophysical problems. For instance, massive multi-wavelength data is being analysed in an attempt to reveal the star formation histories of the earliest galaxies.

AstroGrid (www.astrogrid.org) is a consortium of Universities funded by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council as part of its e-science programme with additional funding through the European Commission's Framework 6 programme.

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The Numerical Mathematics Consortium (Waterloo, Canada; Cambridge, MA; and Austin, TX) recently announced that mathematics software suppliers and individuals from industry and academia are working together to define a consistent and manageable foundation for numerical programming. The organisation is committed to establishing an open mathematical semantics standard for numerical algorithm development to enable portability and reuse among tools, platforms and disciplines.

'Our industry has been lacking a unified and standardised mathematical foundation for a long time,' said Ali Maleki, brake and chassis electronics programme manager at ArvinMeritor.

Numerical Mathematics Consortium founding members include INRIA (Scilab Publisher), Maplesoft, Mathsoft and National Instruments. Individuals from industry and academia are advisers. Further details can be found at www.nmconsortium.org.

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The European bioinformatics market is set to expand from nearly $310m in 2004 to $720m by 2011, according to an analysis by Frost and Sullivan, the global growth consultants.

Governments of European countries have increased their R&D investments in bioinformatics, which has had a positive impact on the growth rate of the European market. They have also taken initiatives to promote the benefits of bioinformatics.

Bioinformatics, the science of informatics applied to biological research, helps to reduce the duration of the biological research process. 'Computational biology works by integrating data from various sources to model a biological process,' said Raghavendra Chitta, industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan.

One of the fastest growing areas is proteomics, the study of proteins. The quantity of protein and genetic data collected is now reaching peta bytes (quadrillion bytes). Bioinformatics is helping scientists collect and analyse all this data.

This is particularly relevant for the drug discovery industry, which is now employing high-level computational biology tools. This reduces the duration of the drug discovery process, especially in toxicology and drug efficacy studies. 'Use of computational biology tools eliminates false leads at the early stages of drug discovery, which helps cut down costs, since the later stages are more expensive and time-consuming.' added Chitta. Scientists at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are collaborating with others in the refinement of quantitative clinical trial modelling using simulation software to improve trial design and predict outcomes.

For the increased uptake of computational biology tools it is essential to have qualified software developers trained in biology, chemistry, and the specific methods of modelling and simulation needed to interpret data to improve the research process. Many countries are setting up new academic programmes tailored to meet this specific demand.

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Turbulence, the random fluctuations that disrupt the orderly flow of a gas or liquid, should slow the acceleration of a hurricane's winds during the process of formation. However, the flow model developed by Barenblatt, Chorin, and Prostokishin shows that when ocean spray, swept up into the storm off the tops of cresting waves, rains back to the sea as droplets of water about 20m in diameter, it counteracts the effects of turbulence, much like a lubricant counteracts the effects of friction. According to Chorin and his colleagues, the friction between the air and water is reduced by a factor of a thousand, and the winds are free to accelerate to speeds approximately eight times faster than they could in the presence of turbulence.

Grigory Barenblatt and Alexandre Chorin, both of Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, and Valeriy Prostokishin of the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow, described their work in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Chorin and Barenblatt are both experts in the development of computational methods for studying the flow of fluids and solving problems involving turbulence, a difficult problem in applied mathematics. The authors dedicated their PNAS paper to the mathematician Sir James Lighthill, who died in 1998.

Barenblatt, Chorin, and Prostokishin developed their flow model from the Sandwich Model proposed by Lighthill. In Lighthill's model, ocean spray forms a cloud of droplets that can be viewed as a third fluid, sandwiched between the fluid layers of sea and air.

Lighthill suggested to Barenblatt that the droplets could lubricate the interactions between sea and air. Lighthill himself focused on the thermodynamic issues involved, the variation of flow energy due to the evaporation of the droplets and the subsequent cooling of the air. Chorin and Barenblatt continued the research.

In the paper, Barenblatt, Chorin, and Prostokishin noted that in ancient times sailors carried oil on their vessels to pour onto the waves to calm a rising storm. They speculated that the spread of the oil could have prevented the formation of turbulence-damping ocean spray droplets. 'Hurricanes might be similarly prevented or damped by having airplanes deliver fast decaying harmless surfactants to the right places on the sea surface,' wrote the authors.

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Tripos, the provider of chemistry research information products, has recently announced the creation of two strategic alliances. The first alliance is with Elsevier MDL, which supplies informatics software. Training and software will be exchanged to ensure good integration between the companies' products.

'This announcement is great news for the users of Tripos and MDL software, who have long been asking for more integrated discovery informatics products,' said Dr Walter Reiher, senior director of discovery informatics for Exelixis and former chair of the American MDL software users' group steering committee.

The second alliance is with CambridgeSoft of Cambridge, MA, a supplier of software to pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Through the alliance, CambridgeSoft will provide Tripos with support and development licenses of its ChemOffice suite, enabling the companies to ensure interoperability of ChemOffice applications with key Tripos Benchware products.

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Consultancy firm Labformatics, which specialises in laboratory management, informatics and business performance, will be holding a one-day seminar entitled 'Maximising the Value of the Laboratory Within Your Business' on 23 November at the Mere Golf and Country Club in Knutsford, near Manchester, UK.

The seminar will focus on laboratory performance and laboratory IT improvement. There will be presentations from organisations including United Utilities, GE Healthcare, the UK Central Science Laboratory and AstraZeneca.

For further details of the event, visit www.labformatics.com.

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Active Motif (Carlsbad, CA) is to offer the text mining system almaKnowledgeServer, made by Bioalma (Madrid, Spain), as part of its CodeQuest workstation.

InforSense KDE, a workflow-based integrative analytics environment, made by InforSense (London, UK) is to support Bayer Healthcare AG's (Cambridge, MA) drug discovery informatics infrastructure.

LabVantage's Sapphire bio-banking system has been chosen by Amylin Pharmaceuticals to manage and track the increasing number of samples used in the research and development of treatments for diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. Using Sapphire, result information about samples can easily be integrated with third party public databases, instruments, and existing laboratory information management systems.

Invitrogen has been appointed as promoter and distributor for Nonlinear Dynamics, a provider of bioinformatics systems. The agreement covers a number of products, including those for the detailed analysis of 1D and 2D electrophoresis gels.

Nonlinear Dynamics (Newcastle, UK) and Waters have recently announced a development and marketing agreement. The agreement has been described by the two companies as a life science research partnership. The companies have also declared their intention to work together on diverse areas of further development.

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