Thermo Fisher Scientific and SRI International Collaborate to Enhance Small Molecule Research

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., the world leader in serving science, and SRI International, a research center that creates world-changing solutions, today announced the results of a collaboration agreement to enable researchers to combine the results of high-resolution Orbitrap LC/MS experiments with highly curated and organism-specific metabolic pathway and genome data for quick and effective mass spectrometry-based small molecule research and analysis.

The outcome of a successful collaboration, researchers now have a direct link between the Thermo Scientific Compound Discoverer 2.1 software platform for small molecule research and SRI International’s BioCyc, a collection of 9,300 databases that provide electronic reference sources on the metabolic pathways and genomes of many organisms. The ability to automatically and interactively overlay statistical data onto these pathways can facilitate the biological interpretation of results obtained from a metabolomics experiment. Ultimately, this new link is expected to speed data analysis for Compound Discoverer users and enable them to visualize many individual compound measurements to gain a comprehensive understanding of biological processes in an experiment.

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,” said Andreas Huhmer, director, proteomics and metabolomics marketing, chromatography and mass spectrometry, Thermo Fisher. “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.”

“We are delighted to bring the power of BioCyc to Thermo Fisher’s customers through a system that’s intuitive and easy to use,” said Peter Karp, director, bioinformatics research group, SRI International. “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.”

Thermo Fisher and SRI International presented information resulting from the collaboration at the 13th Annual Conference of the Metabolomics Society, June 25-29 in Brisbane, Australia.