Agilent releases GeneSpring GX 11.5 multi-omics bioinformatics system

Nov 23 2010

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today introduced GeneSpring GX 11.5, an expansion of its popular bioinformatics software into visualizing and analyzing multiple types of biological data. GeneSpring GX 11.5 now interprets exon microarray, proteomics and metabolomics experiments together for the first time, using a familiar interface.

“This multi-omics bioinformatics system is just part of our commitment to drive future breakthroughs in biomedical research.”

These new capabilities join existing GeneSpring GX applications for gene expression analysis, genomic copy number analysis, genome-wide association analysis and transcriptomics data analysis.

"Agilent is making a major commitment to help researchers achieve the true promise of systems biology by providing sophisticated new instrumentation and software tools," said Gustavo Salem, Agilent vice president and general manager, Biological Systems Division. "This multi-omics bioinformatics system is just part of our commitment to drive future breakthroughs in biomedical research."

Agilent GeneSpring GX 11.5 was developed in conjunction with Strand Scientific Intelligence, Inc. It is powered by Strand's Avadis platform, which is designed specifically to enable scientists to simplify and solve complex life science challenges.

GeneSpring GX 11.5 adds new capabilities for alternative splicing, metabolomics, and proteomics analysis as well as enhancements to existing analytical and visualization tools.

For genomics, the splicing analysis in GeneSpring GX 11.5 has been greatly extended and enhanced to support the new Agilent exon array platform. Agilent SurePrint G3 Exon Microarrays enable researchers to identify both gene-level and exon-level expression changes in a single experiment, to capture subtle but important biological changes. Agilent's GeneSpring GX 11.5 bioinformatics system enhances productivity by enabling investigators to analyze the data at the gene level and at the exon splicing level simultaneously to understand complex gene expression behavior in a biological context.

The new metabolomics and proteomics analysis capabilities result from integration of Agilent Mass Profiler Professional into GeneSpring GX 11.5, bringing the full capabilities of Agilent's mass spectrometry-based analysis into the GeneSpring platform. Researchers can now have multiple experiment types representing transcriptomics, genomics, metabolomics and proteomics open in a single window. This allows users to move back and forth between the experiments as needed without having to load each experiment separately.

This organization also allows researchers to easily combine data in a logical unit and compare results from different experiment types in search of biological insight.

A major differentiator of GeneSpring is the ease with which users can compare heterogeneous data and the depth with which they can perform biological contextualization. Automatic translation of probes across different microarray platforms and organisms allows researchers to compare results through simple drag-and-drop functionality. This seamless translation also allows researchers to quickly identify entity lists that share a statistically significant overlap in content.

The release of GeneSpring 11.5 also adds advanced data management functions such as a comprehensive backup utility and an enhanced data migration tool for users. It also includes integration with GeneGo's MetaCore pathway analysis tool, offering users the ability to combine statistical analysis in GeneSpring with MetaCore's strengths in pathway analysis.