Mining for text and minding for graphs

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Here are two quick items of interest:

  • A recent PLOS Computational Biology methods paper about text mining for protein interactions. As the title "Text Mining for Protein Docking" indicates, the authors are interested in characterizing interactions at the residue level. I'm in favor of any work seeking to draw conclusions from existing but yet-unconnected data. It will be interesting to see where this group goes next.
  • Mind the Graph, a tool for assembling scientific images from templates. It's essentially a clip art collection. Remember when clip art was distributed in [any form other than Google Image Search]? This tool is like that. I found their image collections rather limiting at the moment: there are plenty of animal-specific images but very few appropriate to microbiology or even microbial genetics. Export options also appear to be limited to PNG bitmaps in the free version. That being said, if you have just 15 minutes to assemble a figure before a crucial meeting, Mind the Graph may be essential.
Example output from Mind the Graph. Now I've gone anthropomorphic with a phage again.

Example output from Mind the Graph. Now I've gone anthropomorphic with a phage again.