BioWorld International Correspondent

PARIS - A seminar titled "Teraprot, massive computing in genomics" took place at the Genopole, France's national biotechnology science and business park in Evry, last week to review the progress of two proteomics projects. The projects are Teraprot and Décrypthon, both of which have made their initial results available to the international scientific community through the Internet.

The Teraprot project, which entails pair-by-pair comparisons of complete proteomes, will soon reach a new stage with the completion of the comparative analysis of another 20 proteomes of higher organisms (including those of man and the mouse). The project is being undertaken by a private-public consortium composed of the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), of Paris; Infobiogen (the National Center for Informatics Resources) at the Genopole; and a Paris-based bioinformatics company, Gene-IT SA. The analysis was carried out by the CEA's Tera supercomputer (the largest in Europe and the seventh most powerful worldwide) using an algorithm developed by Gene-IT (Biofacet).

The consortium completed its comparison of an initial batch of 70 proteomes last summer, and the results are available on the website of Infobiogen (www.infobiogen.fr/services/teraprot). The results of the second batch of 20 proteomes similarly will be posted on the Infobiogen website

The second project, Décrypthon, which is being undertaken by the French Muscular Dystrophy Association (AFM) in association with IBM France, was designed to discover the functions of more than 550,000 proteins derived from 76 genomes of living organisms (bacteria, plants, animals, man). It was implemented thanks to the sharing of computer resources (grid computing), which involved the voluntary participation of 75,000 private computer users connected to the Internet. The necessary software was provided by Genomining, a bioinformatics company based at Evry.

It entailed the processing of 2.2 million data files, and the resulting proteome maps also are available on Infobiogen's website (www.infobiogen.fr/services/decrypthon). At the beginning of this year AFM invited the scientific community to propose research projects for exploiting this database, and has so far received 15 proposals, which it is currently evaluating.