Amsterdam, The Netherlands 
June 28, 2010

Part of Expressionist 6, Refiner MS provides best available tool for the analysis of metabolites in plants

Genedata, a leading provider of advanced software solutions for drug discovery and life science research, will demo the new Refiner MS at the 6th Metabolomics Conference 2010. Part of Genedata Expressionist® 6 for omics data management, the new Refiner MS provides enhanced capabilities for Mass Spectrometry (MS)-based biomarker discovery, including sophisticated statistical analysis capabilities for large-volume data sets, new annotation framework, and improved spectrum and chromatogram visualizers. Leading research and biotechnology companies such as the Max Planck Institute (Potsdam - Golm, Germany) use Refiner MS to analyze metabolites in plants and medical fields. Genedata will provide live demonstrations of the Refiner MS module as well as all Genedata Expressionist modules at Booth # 2 (June 27 - July 1).

"Refiner MS addresses key requirements of our metabolomic plant and medical research: accuracy and quality of peak selection; ability to handle very large datasets greater than 1000 chromotagrams; easy-to-use workflows; and advanced reporting capabilities," noted Prof. Lothar Willmitzer, Institute Director at the Max Planck Institute.  "Additionally, Refiner MS is uniquely visual and intuitive. It delivers huge amounts of data in three-dimensional color-coded plots enabling our biologists and chemists to identify trends and patterns. You can't understand data by looking at numbers - you need graphical representation and Refiner MS does this quite nicely."

Automated Quality Assessment and Pre-processing of Raw Data from MS
Refiner MS is integral to the Genedata Expressionist enterprise system, which is built on a highly scalable architecture to provide a single-point-of-access for experimental, proprietary and public data. Compatible with instrumentation from Agilent, Applied Biosystems, Bruker, Cyphergen, Thermo Scientific, and Waters, Refiner MS provides comprehensive pre-processing tools, which help researchers extract quantified and matched peak information from raw MS data. It addresses a range of applications and set-ups from simple one-dimensional spectra to complex experiments involving labeled and label-free technologies in proteomics, metabolomics, and lipidomics.

The new Refiner MS features direct search engine integration from within workflows for interactive searches with Mascot, ChemSpider, and HMDB, as well as offline import results from Mascot, SEQUEST, and MetaboCard -- without information loss. It removes all limitations from the MS data analysis process allowing researchers to process thousands of samples and terabytes of raw MS data. Combining novel visualization for real-time interactive data quality assessment, Refiner MS uses sophisticated algorithms for intensity and alignment correction, peak detection, quantification, and matching. Its advanced raw data visualizer enables significantly faster renderings, automatic m/z peak position labeling, display of 2D peak bounds in chromatogram cuts, and shared selections between peak clusters and annotation tables.

"Our products reflect the collaborative relationships we have with our customers and we are innovating solutions such as the Refiner MS module of our Genedata Expressionist system to continually address customer requirements," noted Dr. Othmar Pfannes, CEO of Genedata. "We understand that our customers need to make sense of gigabytes of data per sample, and the refined and optimized levels of visualization and interactivity in Refiner MS enable them to explore data and extract meaningful information that paves the way for new scientific discoveries. We believe Genedata Expressionist sets the standard for omics data analysis and management."

Website: http://www.mpg.de

Published: June 28, 2010