Biogemma, a company specialising in plant biotechnologies for the agricultural sector, has selected Tibco Spotfire 3.1 to move beyond transcriptomic analyses and embark on new types of integrative research based on genetic maps. As part of its overall plan to develop a comprehensive solution to search all the data produced by the company's various platforms, Biogemma will centralise data from outside projects, projects in collaboration with public or private partners, or data available in the public domain generally published in scientific articles.
This must be integrated and formatted before it can be used and the flexibility of Spotfire enables Biogemma’s researchers to work with heterogeneous data. Links are created between the data produced internally and all other data from various sources, and can produce an accurate and efficient analytical view of their research.
The principal users of Spotfire are the members of the GeneDiscovery team, engineers and PhDs who conduct ‘in silico’ analyses by integrating and comparing data from the services platforms in order to discover the most effective genes for improving plants in an agricultural context. In addition to this team, other researchers and project managers use it to visualise analyses of research into similarities between DNA sequences, or when they wish to add more of a reporting dimension to the analyses.
By having access to this new representation of data analysis, researchers have seen that by analysing DNA sequences, large regions on chromosomes were organised in a particular manner. They have long had all the data needed to realise this, but this data, which was too detailed and too abundant, would have needed to be analysed and dissected by creating an entire analysis chain designed with an underlying hypothesis related to significant genomic movements.
During research on corn genome, Biogemma’s teams updated links between the genetic and genomic data. The Spotfire interface enabled them, without having to develop a special tool, to visualise a graph representing the ‘recombination curve’ of each chromosome of the corn, result of the data accumulation, by creating a genotyping chip. Biogemma’s researchers drew on the analysis capability of the solution and were able to integrate information concerning 16,000 positions (genetic markers) on more than 4,000 varieties of corn, and correlate the genetic position and the genomic position in order to obtain the recombination curve.