Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI) are using innovative liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry (LC/MS) software to ease the load of data in systems biology research.
The team are studying the metabolic processes of living cells, which involves the analysis of large volumes of cell metabolites. New experimental techniques have meant more and more samples can be analysed in a shorter space of time, but this has created an avalanche of data that needs to be managed.
To solve this problem, the team applied ACD/IntelliXtract from ACD/Labs to automatically extract the chromatographic components and to interpret the mass spectra for each component. Components of interest can then be labelled and isolated from other components for identification, helping researchers to gain a quicker understanding of their results.
‘There is an inevitable backlog of information that occurs with high-throughput analysis and ACD/IntelliXtract is able to automate some of that work,’ said Dr Vladimir Shulaev, associate professor at VBI and the head of the biochemical profiling research group.
