Agilent Technologies has introduced GeneSpring GX 11, the latest generation of its desktop software for visualising and analysing microarray data, and GeneSpring Workgroup 11, the enterprise version of the GeneSpring desktop software.
The company said that the product is designed to support multi-omics research. GeneSpring 11 adds capabilities for genetic association analysis using genotyping data, genomic copy number analysis, and other analytical and visualisation tools to facilitate comparison of these heterogeneous data.
The company claims that with GeneSpring 11, researchers can have multiple experiment types, such as microRNA, gene expression, genotyping, and copy number, open simultaneously within a single window. This allows users to move back and forth between the data as needed without having to load each experiment separately. This functionality also allows researchers to combine data within a logical unit and compare results from different experiment types. GeneSpring 11 adds the ability for researchers to use MeSH terms as input for generating networks.
Additionally, the automatic translation of probes across different microarray platforms and organisms allows researchers to compare results through simple drag-and-drop function into a Venn diagram. The translation also allows researchers to identify entity lists that share an overlap in content. The ease of data exploration allows the quick discovery of drug treatments, disease states, or other experimental factors that share similar biological profiles and, therefore, may share similar underlying mechanisms.
Chris Grimley, senior director of marketing of genomics at Agilent, said: The multi-omics approach to defining mechanism of disease in systems biology research has created a bioinformatics bottleneck, where the ability to extract biological knowledge from the data often lags behind the ability to generate the data. GeneSpring 11 was developed with this bottleneck in mind and addresses some of the challenges of integrative analysis