NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Illumina and Elsevier R&D Solutions have signed an agreement to integrate Elsevier's Pathway Studio with Illumina's BaseSpace Correlation Engine platform.
Pathway Studio is Elsevier's database of experimental data and disease models. It provides tools for exploring molecular interactions as well as cause and effect relationships associated with various biological processes. The most recent version of the software also includes tools for browsing and filtering DNA variant data from next-generation sequencing projects, and assessing the effects of these mutations on protein function and disease progression, according to the company.
The BaseSpace Correlation Engine, which was formerly called NextBio Research, is a platform for aggregating and interpreting large quantities of genomic data for research and clinical applications. It provides a suite of applications that help researchers identify mechanisms of disease, drug targets, and prognostic or predictive biomarkers as well as curated and correlated public and private genomic data. This includes over 130,000 experimental comparisons gleaned from more than a half million samples from the National Center for Biotechnology Information's Gene Expression Omnibus and other open- and controlled-access databases, according to Illumina.
Under the terms of the agreement between the two companies, licensed Correlation Engine users will have free access to Pathway Viewer, a Pathway Studio application that lets researchers visualize functional relationships among genes and identify the pathways that are most highly correlated with their lists of genes. Correlation Engine customers will be able to transfer information directly from the BaseSpace platform to Pathway Studio and visualize their results, according to the partners.
"Our collaboration extends the reach of the sample-to-answer solutions provided by Illumina's BaseSpace Sequence Hub Platform," Joe Delaney, Illumina's manager of research curation, said in a statement. "Investigators can now stream their RNA-Seq data directly into SequenceHub for analysis, transport their results for meta-analysis in Correlation Engine, and then visualize and overlay their findings with Elsevier's repertoire of curated knowledge of genetic relationships."
Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.