About LifeFormulae
Welcome to LifeFormulae, the toolmaker for life-science researchers worldwide. Our focus: To help investigators shorten the time from research to results. Our commitment: To provide you with the quickest route to the genomic and proteomic answers you need.
LifeFormulae, LLC is a bioinfomatics company located in Houston, Texas, that makes tools for the life science research community. The company was founded in January 2004 by John Alan Halter and William J. Eaton. Both founders had been affiliated with the Baylor College of Medicine for over 20 years. Their keystone product, LARTS, (the LifeFormulae ASN.1 Reader Tool Set) mines data from the ASN.1 GenBank binary files, as provided by NCBI, and converts them into formats commonly used for life sciences research, including XML, FASTA, and GenBank formats. Accessed online as a software-as-a-service, LARTS users employ keyword and tag-path searches for faster results.
Researchers in the life sciences fields have to sift through terabytes of public data archived at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) to locate information of interest to their research. NCBI provides access to this data through, for example, the Entrez search service at their website. Users may also download data files from the NCBI ftp website for extended local research. Mining for this data may take hours and even days, depending on the nature of the search. It is up to the researcher to keep up with daily additions to the NCBI data to maintain their own unique research.
LifeFormulae was founded with the goal of offering tools and services that allow researchers to assemble the bioinformatics data that they need in a more effective and timely manner without the need for additional expensive resources.
Some of the benefits of using LARTS over the NCBI tools to mine data include:
- The ASN.1 to XML data conversion is complete, without dropped fields. Default values for fields are included in the output data. The NCBI asn2xml tool omits defaulted-value fields.
- The generated XML is simple. It is described by an XML schema rather than the DTD used by asn2xml, so tag structure is simple and tag names are SHORT.
- LARTS is written in Java so the same program file runs on any computer that supports a Java runtime.
- No programming is needed for most tasks, including using new ASN.1 data definitions. User extensions may be added using standard Java programming interfaces.
- LARTS ASN.1 support is complete. Most of the 2002 ASN.1 standard is implemented, so as to be useful as a general-purpose ASN.1 data reading tool.
- LARTS includes the entire NCBI ASN.1 data definition set and extensive cross-referencing of NCBI data types.
- LARTS programs have simple graphical interfaces.