by Regina Nuzzo, Ph.D.
Biomedical Computation Review
Winter/Spring 2007
News Bytes
Text-mining tools such as iHOP (Information Hyperlinked Over Proteins) are doing for biological literature what hyperlinks and search engines do for the Internet: organizing interconnected information in a fast, intuitive, searchable manner. And in January 2007, the service started to provide daily updates–extending the information network by about 2,000 new papers every day.
With genes and proteins acting as hyperlinks between sentences and abstracts, a large part of the PubMed knowledge base becomes a giant, navigable information network, says Robert Hoffmann, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Sloan-Kettering Institute who started the iHOP project while a researcher at the Protein Design Group at the National Center for Biotechnology (CNB) in Madrid, Spain. “The new version provides current information on even more genes and chemical compounds, covering 1,500 organisms ranging from human and chimpanzee to yeast and HIV,” Hoffman says. He and his colleagues also extended iHOP’s results to include drug interactions, and they’ve provided new ways to interact with the data–such as displaying “breaking news” found in papers from the past two years.
