Bio-Rad releases version 7.5 of its know-it-all informatics system featuring a new edition for metabolomics research

Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (AMEX: BIO and BIOb), a multinational manufacturer and distributor of life science research products and clinical diagnostics, today announced the release of version 7.5 of its award-winning KnowItAll® Informatics System. The new release offers enhancements to many of the applications featured in prior versions of the KnowItAll platform and features a new edition of the software, the KnowItAll Informatics System - Metabolomics Edition for metabolomics research.

KnowItAll Informatics System - Metabolomics Edition:

• Integrates Infometrix' Pirouette® chemometrics technology with Bio-Rad's award-winning KnowItAll platform, databases and NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) tools.
• Is the first end-to-end metabolomics research platform, providing spectral analysis and chemometrics tools in addition to links to metabolic pathways for metabolite/biomarker identification.
• The integration of these technologies allows researchers performing metabolic profiling studies to manage and analyze data easily in their search for relevant biomarkers. This capability is useful for distinguishing normal versus abnormal biological systems, response to drug treatment, and toxicological evaluation in disease treatments.

*Other features and enhancements of version 7.5 of the KnowItAll Informatics System:

• KnowItAll's AnalyzeIt™ MVP application now offers a peak alignment feature to adjust and correct unwanted spectral shifts prior to chemometric analysis.
• Bio-Rad's new IntelliBucket™ technology now offers customers a data binning approach based on Bio-Rad's patent-pending Overlap Density Heatmap technology, permitting flexible analysis of NMR spectra for optimal results.
• Researchers can now generate "trajectory" plots within the KnowItAll system. The trajectory maps the time course of a metabolic response or dosage response to a xenobiotic treatment.
• A new "Class Separation" feature provides a quantification of the degree of separation between different classes of objects in a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) study.
• Researchers can now use loadings plots derived from PCA studies performed using the KnowItAll system as a search query against a metabolite database in identifying potential biomarkers.
• A new "Stereo Viewing" data visualization tool for 3D structures and 3D data plots.
• Improved record and property handling for the MineIt™ data mining and database building application.
• Improvements to NMR pre-, post-, and batch processing of data, as well as a new peak picking algorithm are also included in this release.
• New report templates that allow researchers share their results/output for a typical NMR-based metabolomics experiment.
• A new database of 1H and 13C NMR spectra of metabolites for identifying potential biomarkers of metabolomics experiments, generated from the BioMagResBank (BMRB), an online database hosted by the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
• A new technology for Maximum Common Substructure (MCS) analysis that generates a tabular list of all maximal common substructures found by the pair-wise comparison of all structures in the data set along with the total number of occurrences of that substructure in the entire data set. This technology allows easy visual assessment of the degree of structural similarity in a dataset and complement.

Bio-Rad's patent-pending Overlap Density Heatmap technology, which allows easy visual assessment of the degree of spectral similarity in a dataset.