NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Agilent Technologies and the University of Western Australia today announced a collaboration to build what they say is the world's first plant protein monitoring database.
The Australian Research Centre's Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology located in the university will use Agilent's informatics systems in its research to build the database. Agilent's HPLC-Chip MS system, OpenLab Electronic Lab Notebook, and Enterprise Content Manager are being used for the project.
UWA will modify the OpenLab ELN and Enterprise Content Manager workflows to develop a research lab-specific electronic environment, the partners said, adding that data on how plants respond to environment changes "will showcase the new research setting."
"The data will be used to search for unknown links between different plant species and their responses to drought, cold, salinity, and low nutrition," they said. Researchers will also be able to use the data for targeted analysis of defined sets of plant proteins to answer specific questions.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Today's announcement is part of a longer-term collaboration between UWA and Agilent, they said, and recently Agilent provided matching funds for the purchase of a new triple-quadrupole mass spectrometer for the quantification of known plant proteins.