Wolfenbüttel, Germany
June 1, 2004
BIOBASE, the leading
provider of biological databases, announced today the licensing
of the enzyme database
BRENDA® by BASF
Plant Science. Thus BIOBASE intensifies its activities in
the chemistry division and in plant biotechnology.
The plant biotechnology company BASF Plant Science has recently
become licensee of the enzyme database BRENDA(R). This news was
announced today by BIOBASE GmbH, a company that has been
actively developing and providing high-quality, scientific
databases for the biotechnology, agrobiotech, pharma and
chemistry industries since 1997.
"We are extremely pleased that our technology of expertly
maintained, molecular-biological databases will be used in such
leading companies as BASF. Our customers can effectively deal
with the high level of pressure for innovation in the
biotechnology market segment with the bioinformatics know-how of
the BRENDA(R)database," states Prof. Dr. Edgar Wingender,
CSO, BIOBASE. "By using the key technology bioinformatics, for
example, tremendous cost savings can be realized in research on
the optimization of useful plants."
The electronic encyclopedia BRENDA(R) (enzymeta GmbH, Prof.
Dr. Schomburg) contains data on 83,000 different enzymes from
9,800 organisms and additional metabolic data that has been
manually annotated from more than 46,000 publications. The newly
published module BRENDA(R) LIGAND provides information
on ligands from 500,000 enzyme-ligand relationships, more than
46,000 different chemical compounds and 34,500 structures of
ligands from 56,608 publications.
BIOBASE was founded in 1997 from the bioinformatics research
group of the German Research Centre for Biotechnology (GBF). The
company distributes worldwide licenses for in-house developed
molecular biological databases and is also active as a
distributor for in-licensed databases. Its product portfolio
also includes the internationally acclaimed molecular
biological databases TRANSFAC(R)
(gene regulation) and
TRANSPATH(R)-NetPro(TM) (signal networks). So far, over 50
of the larger biotechnological and pharmaceutical companies and
over 200 universities and academic institutes are
satisfied customers of the company.
All BASF activities involving plant biotechnology are
incorporated in BASF Plant Science. BASF Plant Science
coordinates an international research and technology platform
with seven sites in four countries in Europe and
North America. Through the use of plant biotechnology, BASF
Plant Science seeks to develop crops that provide a healthier
diet through improved constituents as well as plants with
improved cultivation properties, such as enhanced tolerance to
drought. |