Collaboration between French research organisation CNRS and InforMax on bioinformatics

As part of the strategic collaboration agreement between InforMax and CNRS, InforMax will provide CNRS with InforMax's GenoMax and Vector NTI software products, bioinformatics consultants and technical support. GenoMax is InforMax's enterprise genomics product suite, which enables molecular biologists and genetic researchers to conduct integrated genomics analysis on large amounts of public and proprietary data. Vector NTI maximises bench lab productivity through simulation of wet lab processes, such as strategic DNA recombinant design. InforMax will also be selling genetic data through the licensing of CNRS' IMAGE Knowledge Base.

Dr. Charles Auffray, a pioneer in functional and computational genomics, heads the CNRS team, which will be working with InforMax. Over the last 10 years, Dr. Auffray and his team have developed considerable expertise in the collection and analysis of massive amounts of diverse data types related to the structure and expression profiles of tens of thousands of human genes and their map location within the human genome. The work was initially conducted within the Genethon Laboratory, where Dr. Auffray was one of the Scientific Directors. Dr. Auffray's work was further expanded through the IMAGE Consortium, co-founded by Auffray and leading U.S. genome scientists.

"CNRS selected InforMax's GenoMax product because of its powerful analytical tools, security features, enterprise capabilities and its ability to efficiently integrate enormous amounts of diverse data", said Dr. Auffray. "We felt that InforMax had the best product available and had a strategic forward direction in terms of product development that was superior to anyone else due to their outstanding team of developers."

"InforMax is pleased to have been selected by the French National Center for Scientific Research as the software provider of choice in such a critical high performance computing environment", said Alex Titomirov, president and CEO of InforMax. "We look forward to working with Dr. Auffray and his CNRS team from both a technology and bioinformatics consulting context to ensure their success."

Dr. Auffray's group has established a methodology for the curation, annotation and clustering of both sequence and gene mapping information, which was derived from the IMAGE Consortium collections of cDNA clones. These represent most human genes and their transcripts across various tissues and cells. This data is registered in a CNRS Index and forms the basis for the ongoing development of CNRS' IMAGE Knowledge Base of the Human Genome and Transcriptome. It is here where the integration of sequence, map and expression data (collected by cDNA array hybridisation) takes place to assist in the identification of structural, positional and functional candidate genes for specific biological functions and pathologies.