Collaboration Software
New software provided by Entelechon allows biologists to work seamlessly together with their colleagues across the room – or across continents. Entelechon’s collaboration software is a client/server system where multiple users can work together online on biological tasks, including vector design, development of cloning strategies, gene optimization, structure modeling or data processing.
Changes made by one user to DNA sequences, literature references or imaging data are seen instantaneously by all other users on their screens. This enables direct and efficient interaction between all users in a work group.
As distributed collaboration across labs and borders becomes more and more important, this new system is a valuable tool for internationally operating work groups. Being specifically developed for biological tasks, the system goes far beyond conventional desktop sharing or webcasting solutions: It can represent any biological data, and it offers specific tools and user interfaces for the manipulation of such data – be it protein tertiary structures, imaging data, spectra, or sequence information and annotations.
One important aspect is the processing of huge data sets, such as are typically created by high throughput methods. Since each client sees a relatively small dynamic ‘window’ onto the data, there is no need to download whole data sets to each attached site. Instead, the data sets reside securely on the server, from where relevant pieces are sent to the client computers on demand. This alleviates current IT and bandwidth bottlenecks in distributed high throughput projects.
Moreover, the system can distribute computationally demanding tasks such as BLAST searches across all attached computers. In this way, excess computing capacities in small networks can be leveraged for high level bioinformatics computations.
The collaboration software will be made available as an on-demand service where user groups can access the system and work together spontaneously. Entelechon will also provide licenses for in-house usage in large corporations, and will add new custom-made modules upon request.
We will start a public, free beta test soon. If you are interested in getting early access to the software, please register for the beta test here.
For more details, we have prepared a PDF presentation.