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The National Institutes of Health is making available for licensing its Interactive Venn Diagram Software designed for microarray analysis, which expedites genetic research.

The software, like other government-owned inventions, is being released for licensing to speed commercialization of results from federally funded research and development.

According to The Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., "a microarray is a tool for measuring the amount of messenger RNA (mRNA) that is circulating in a cell. It is the mRNA that transfers information from the genes from DNA inside the nucleus of a cell to create various proteins. Even though they have the exact same DNA, different cells have different amounts of various mRNA because they need to produce different proteins. For example, only certain cells in the pancreas produce insulin even though the DNA code for producing insulin exists inside all cells."

The Java-based software gives investigators a method of displaying multiple conditions in a single graphic along with a text output of genes that "that are the product of these conditional intersections along with each condition's unique list," according to a notice published June 8 in the <I>Federal Register</I>. "A standard Venn diagram is limited to only display three comparisons; this software can display any number of comparisons and will automatically create lists from all intersections even if not able to be displayed along with each condition's unique list."

For more information, visit gpoaccess.gov/fr/index.html.

--Joseph Goedert