Thermo Fisher and SRI partner to enhance small molecule research

Life sciences company Thermo Fisher Scientific and research centre SRI International have announced a collaboration to enhance small molecule research. 

The collaboration will enable researchers to 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 9300 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 visualise 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.”

“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,” said Peter Karp, director, bioinformatics research group, SRI International.