NI Labs – Bioinformatics/Biological Data Management

The Lab Automation market has grown from $465M in 1998 to $2.1B in 2003 based on research by Strategic Directions Inc. Given the government and private sector funding going into the biotech industry, these numbers are not surprising.

In talking with lab automation specialists one of the first topics that come up is the volume of data generated by lab automation systems in the drug discovery process. It’s not unusual for scientists to download 500 megabyte files from several of the 750+ databases containing genomic/proteomic/biological data and then merging it with their own research data. Given three or four file downloads and your into the gigabytes of data.

To solve this, NI has come up with a starter kit for managing Bioinformatics/Biological data and offers it through their NI Labs program.

The software kit works with Diadem which is a technical data management tool that provides a user interface for managing and analyzing data and is ideal for combining data from multiple sources and indexing the data so it’s searchable.

It’s common for researchers to download data from say the Stanford MicroArray Database, or the GEO (Genomic Expression Omnibus) database to compare to their own test results.

Finally, scientists studying biological interactions generate many times the volume of data today than 20 years ago. The toolkit can analyze and manage that data as well.

Best regards,
Hall T.