This is an exciting post to write. It’s not often you get to announce a new product, especially one addressing a new application; the relative quantification of compounds and metabolites. This takes the Progenesis range beyond proteomics and into the complimentary area of metabolomics, or metabonomics depending on the term you prefer!
Progenesis CoMet analyses LC-MS or GC-MS data to help you discover and reliably quantify the compound ions that are significantly changing in your samples. The result is a final set of identified compounds or metabolites to report or follow up with confidence. That is an easy claim to make, harder to prove, especially with a new product still waiting for final testing before release. So we look forward to getting it into your hands so you can tell us how well it works.
To get a demonstration on your data once the product is released please contact us.
Going from proteins to metabolites
With Progenesis SameSpots, Progenesis LC-MS and Progenesis MALDI we have established products for proteomics. The concept for Progenesis CoMet came from meeting several customers using Progenesis LC-MS to quantify changes in classes of molecules other than proteins. Encouraged by how it performed and hearing the limitations using other existing software for metabolomics/metabonomics, we started developing Progenesis CoMet. It began with a focus group hosted at Malmaison, here in Newcastle. The meeting was full of debate and insights, which continued over dinner.
We brought together some people we knew and others we didn’t, but have very soon got to know. The aim was to discuss the major challenges and suggested solutions for reliable quantification of compounds and metabolites. The consensus was that the biggest challenges we needed to address were:
- Comparing results between different experiments (using the same type of technique)
- Peak picking
- Identification and handling ambiguity of identifications
- Statistics
- Integrating results from different techniques (e.g. NMR + LC-MS)
Our solution has been applied to address the first four challenges, based on the Progenesis approach to data analysis that has been widely accepted by proteomics researchers. However, Progenesis CoMet has been extensively developed to meet the specific needs of compound and metabolomics data analysis. I should say the final challenge of integrating results from completely different analytical techniques is even too much for our developers to achieve in a first round of development!
On-going development
We’ve kept the momentum going that we started, continuing to work with the people who attended the focus group as well as recruiting more along the way. Each group is interested in different classes of compounds and struggles with a variety of current bioinformatics solutions to make sense of their data but they all share the same goal: To find a simple, effective solution to analysing LC or GC-MS data, quantify what is changing and confidently report the significantly changing compounds.
We hope we have achieved this with Progenesis CoMet and eagerly await your feedback as the product is released, which will help it to further address your needs. Contact us for more information or why not leave a comment here?
We look forward to sharing more news of this exciting new product as things develop.
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