Biodiscovery has announced that Fox Chase Cancer Center's Keystone Program in Blood Cell Development and Cancer has acquired a site license for Nexus Copy Number and Nexus Expression.
These two tools were designed specifically for scientists working on DNA copy number and RNA expression analysis from microarray data.
The Keystone Program researchers are using Nexus Copy Number and Nexus Expression to help identify genes involved in blood cell development and transformation.
Identification of such genes is important for further enhancement in treatment of cancers of the blood as genes involved in normal development are also likely to be involved in transformation of normal blood cells into cancerous cells.
Dr Richard Hardy, co-leader of the Keystone Program, said: 'We've put Nexus Expression to use profiling gene expression in populations of immune cells we're examining as part of the Immgen Consortium.
'We're also beginning to employ Nexus Copy Number for characterising a group of B lymphomas as a part of our studies on the origins of blood cancers.' Dr David Wiest, another co-leader of the Keystone Program, said: 'The Nexus Suite enables us to be less dependent on in-house bioinformatics support as we attempt to identify the subset of genes regulating development and transformation from among the larger cohort, whose altered expression or copy-number is merely correlated with these processes.' Nexus Copy Number and Nexus Expression are platform independent products supporting all array platforms including Agilent, Affymetrix, Illumina, Roche Nimblegen and custom arrays.
They can integrate data from thousands of arrays in a single project and provide an interface that allows exploration of data to generate biological knowledge with a few mouse clicks.
Nexus Copy Number allows analysis of CGH and SNP arrays for single or multiple sample analysis and Nexus Expression provides analysis of gene expression arrays.
