Thermo Fisher Scientific and SRI International have entered a collaboration agreement to allow researchers to combine the results of high-resolution Orbitrap LC/MS experiments with organism-specific metabolic pathway and genome data for quicker and more effective mass spectrometry-based small molecule research and analysis.

Researchers will now have a direct link between the Thermo Scientific Compound Discoverer 2.1 software platform and SRI’s BioCyc, a collection of 9,300 databases that provide electronic reference sources on metabolic pathways and genomes of many organisms. The ability to automatically overlay statistical data onto these pathways can help facilitate the biological interpretation of results from a metabolomics experiment. Ultimately, this new link aims to speed data analysis for Compound Discoverer users and enable them to visualize individual compound measurements for a more comprehensive understanding of biological processes.
 
“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.”