Agilent Technologies and SRI International Announce Licensing Deal
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The integrated package will allow scientists to access, combine, visualize and analyze biological data sets across multiple "omics" experiments (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics).
"We are pleased to join forces with SRI to provide this advanced product offering," said Nick Roelofs, president of Agilent's Life Sciences Group. "By combining SRI's rich BioCyc pathway content with our fully-integrated laboratory technologies, we are providing researchers with a complete solution for designing more informed experiments, free of the cumbersome technical challenges of traditional multi-omics research. We chose to work with SRI because of the company's breadth of coverage of organisms and excellent curation."
The new software package will enable researchers to display biological pathway data generated by Agilent's suite of instruments, software and reagents. Agilent solutions include microarrays and next-generation sequencing technology, as well as LC/MS, GC/MS, ICP/MS and NMR systems. Agilent is the sole global provider of world-class instruments, consumables and software for all four "omics" disciplines.
"SRI's databases in the BioCyc Pathway collection will offer Agilent customers the high level of curation needed to accurately interpret their large-scale datasets," said Peter Karp, Ph.D., director of the Bioinformatics Research Group at SRI International. "Our EcoCyc and MetaCyc databases have been curated from 23,000 and 35,000 publications, respectively. Along with other BioCyc databases, they help speed research in myriad domains, including biofuels, agroscience, pharmaceuticals and consumer products."
SRI's BioCyc is a collection of 2,038 Pathway/Genome Databases including 497 complete bacterial genomes from the Human Genome Microbiome Project. Each of the databases in the collection describes the genome and metabolic pathways of a single organism. SRI continues to expand the BioCyc collection with new types of data, curation, genomes and associated pathway predictions.
"Researchers are excited about the extraordinary capabilities they will have with this pathway-driven technology," said Steven Fischer, Agilent's marketing manager for metabolomics and proteomics. "Some of them, for example, may be doing genomics experiments and then realize that their next step should really be a metabolomics experiment. Either way, Agilent's comprehensive suite of integrated technologies provides the hardware, software and consumables required to complete multiple cycles of experiments in multiple disciplines. As each experiment informs the next, they can quickly redesign, collect, measure and analyze new sets of data at a much faster rate than ever before."
Agilent's combined hardware/software and informatics solutions are fueling the next generation of pathway-centric multi-omics research and yielding valuable information about drug responses, drug resistance, diagnostic markers and fundamental disease/toxicity pathways.
