Waters Corporation (NYSE: WAT) today announced it has entered into a non-exclusive co-marketing and reselling agreement with PREMIER Biosoft International (Palo Alto, CA) to advance lipidomics research. Waters will offer PREMIER Biosoft's SimLipid® informatics platform for sale with Waters® ACQUITY UPLC® and high-resolution, exact mass SYNAPT® and XEVO® mass spectrometers for lipid analysis. PREMIER Biosoft released its SimLipid software product earlier in 2011.
Responding to the challenges set forth by leading lipid researchers, Waters exact mass UPLC/MS systems for lipid analysis combine UltraPerformance LC® and proprietary ion mobility mass spectrometry technology with advanced lipidomics informatics for comprehensive and rigorous lipid characterization from complex biological samples. Ion mobility, found only with Waters SYNAPT mass spectrometers, brings an additional, orthogonal dimension of sample separation to lipid analysis. This technology provides greater levels of specificity and class separation to lipid analysis, including the separation of isobaric/isomeric lipid species.
"Waters UPLC, ion mobility, advanced mass spectrometry and informatics technologies have created a lipid analysis platform which provides greater insight into our complex biological investigations than ever before," says Professor Jeremy K. Nicholson, Head of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College London, a Waters Center of Innovation. Waters Centers of Innovation Program recognizes and supports the research of leading scientists and institutions around the world in numerous application areas including metabolomics and lipidomics.
PREMIER Biosoft's SimLipid augments the Waters UPLC -- HDMSe (ion mobility -- mass spectrometry) data by performing an exact mass precursor ion search to generate a list of lipid candidates which are then ranked by comparing diagnostic product ions observed in the high energy HDMSe data and structure specific in-silico fragment ions from the SimLipid database. Interpretation of spectra has been made easy by annotating matched peaks with corresponding compounds. SimLipid generates portable reports and images in different file formats such as XLS, CSV, HTML, JPEG and PNG to facilitate dynamic information sharing. In addition, each structure is mined for its associated class, reaction, pathway and enzyme, so that scientists don't waste time and money on laborious manual annotation.
According to Kay Brown, President at PREMIER Biosoft, "PREMIER Biosoft is very pleased to work with Waters Corporation to offer a whole product solution to the lipidomics and glycobiology research community."
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