Proteome Systems, CSIRO team up in data mining

Two of the leading forces in Australian bioinformatics are pooling their expertise to build a new generation of protein expression data mining tools.

Proteome Systems and CSIRO have signed a licensing agreement that will embed powerful new multivariate statistical analysis modules in Proteome Systems’ commercial bioinformatics platform.

The new tools will permit deeper levels of data analysis by Proteome’s BioinformatIQ and ImageIQ products, according to the company. The data mining modules being licensed from CSIRO have been developed and optimised by CSIRO Bioinformatics for the IBM AIX operating system.

Proteome will do further work on the modules’ graphical user interface aimed at incorporating them seamlessly into its product stream.

“The vision is to integrate these modules with all the data our software currently stores from mass spectrometers and protein expression analysis,” said Proteome Systems vice president for bioinformatics, Dr Marc Wilkins.

“The unique thing is that when you store all the sample data, including clinical covariables such as smoking status or age, these multivariate statistical tools allow you to ask very deep questions about why the expression levels of certain proteins are changing.” This is not the first time CSIRO and Proteome have joined forces. The two organisations several years ago signed a licensing pact which drew on CSIRO’s expertise in imaging algorithms to significantly upgrade the image analysis tools available to proteomics researchers.

Financial details of the latest agreement were not released.

Proteome Systems has a long-running strategic alliance with IBM and has joint ventures with Itochu Corporation in Japan and Charles River Laboratories in the US. However CSIRO is the only domestic organisation with which it has licensing agreements.