NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Informatics firm Nonlinear Dynamics said today that it has been purchased by Waters.
Announcing the acquisition in a post on the company's blog, Nonlinear General Manager Duncan Barrie said that the deal emerged from a two-year partnership between the two firms on the informatics software product TransOmics, which was released last year for use with Waters' SYNAPT G2-S mass spectrometer.
Launched at the 2012 American Society for Mass Spectrometry annual meeting, TransOmics is intended for the integration of proteomics, metabolomic, and lipidomic data.
As reported by ProteoMonitor in August 2012, the companies announced an agreement to co-develop additional software to analyze data from large-scale proteomics and metabolomics experiments. Those development efforts were to focus in particular on building algorithms to more fully utilize "the ion mobility information" generated by the firm's Synapt mass spec systems, James Langridge, Waters' director of proteomics, said at the time.
He added that building tools for data-independent acquisition mass spec and integration of data across omics disciplines would also be key points of emphasis.
In addition to TransOmics, Nonlinear also offers its Progenesis LC-MS software for analysis of label-free quantitative proteomics data, and its Progenesis CoMet software for metabolomics work.
Both programs support data generated by a number of major mass spec vendors including Waters, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Bruker, Agilent, and AB Sciex. In his post, Barrie suggested this support would not change with Waters' purchase of Nonlinear, noting that "Waters is firmly committed to Progenesis LC-MS and Progenesis CoMet as the premier data analysis software for extracting fundamental information from omics data sets – whatever the source."
As part of the deal, sales and support of Nonlinear's SameSpots software for 2D gel image analysis will be taken over by the firm's sister company, TotalLab, Barrie said.
Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.