Thermo Fisher Scientific announces collaboration with SRI International to advance small molecule research

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (MA, USA) has announced that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with research centre SRI International (CA, USA) to advance small molecule research. The agreement allows for the incorporation of SRI International’s BioCyc database collection, which consists of 9,300 databases on the metabolic pathways and genomes of many organisms, into the Thermo Scientific Compound Discoverer 2.1 software platform.

This direct link between Thermo Scientific’s software platform for small molecule research and the BioCyc databases will enable researchers to automatically combine data that is expected to enhance research in small molecules by speeding up data analysis for Thermo Scientifics users and allowing researchers better understand biological processes.

Director of proteomics and metabolomics marketing, chromatography and mass spectrometry at Thermo Fisher, Andreas Hummer, commented: “Today, metabolomics researchers can measure thousands of small molecules, but it can be challenging to know which cellular systems are behaving differently in the studied condition compared to a control.

“The new integration will allow scientists using Compound Discoverer to automatically map the most detected compounds to BioCyc metabolic pathway diagrams and to connect additional experimental data, such as relative abundance or differential expression, onto the pathways.”

Discussing the collaboration, Peter Karp, director of bioinformatics research group at SRI International, commented: “We are delighted to bring the power of BioCyc to Thermo Fisher’s customers through a system that’s intuitive and easy to use. Scientists can now follow a link from Compound Discoverer to a BioCyc metabolic pathway page to gain access to a comprehensive knowledge-hub of genome and pathway information.”

Source: http://thermofisher.mediaroom.com/press-releases?item=122762