On January 18, German proteomics company Biobase tripled in size overnight by acquiring a database subsidiary of Incyte of Wilmington, Delaware, known as Proteome of Beverly, Massachusetts.
All six of Proteome’s databases, integrating proteomic information of organisms ranging from yeast to humans, will be folded into the existing portfolio of Wolfenbüttel-based Biobase, which already contained other databases in areas such as transcription factors and signal transduction pathways.
The transfer could be good news for some academic researchers who have been complaining about steep access fees that were introduced by Incyte three years ago (Nature 418, 357, 2002).
According to Edgar Wingender, CSO at Biobase, the company plans to introduce freely accessible ‘light’ versions of all databases, including theYeast Proteome Database and the so-called HumanPSD database, which combines human, mouse and rat data. Only the Caenorhabditis elegans database, which competes with the publicly available ‘Wormbase,’ will be completely free.
Yeast researcher Nava Segev, at the University of Illinois in Chicago, welcomes the reappearance of free databases, but remains cautious about the overall impact of the sale. “We’ll have to wait and see how functional the free versions are,” she says, “and hope that a small company will be able to keep up with exponentially growing amounts of information.”