Expansion of image-analysis capabilities at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

SEPTEMBER 26--Definiens AG (Munich, Germany), a leader in advanced image intelligence solutions, has entered into an agreement with The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (Cambridge, UK;www.sanger.ac.uk) to augment its programs aimed at creating large-scale gene expression profiles. The 'Atlas of Protein Expression' and 'Embryo Gene Expression' programs at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute both aim to produce large-scale public databases describing gene and protein expression patterns in developing embryo and adult tissues.

"To achieve these ends we have applied high-throughput immunohistochemistry and automated image capture, generating terabyte-scale image databases," commented Gareth Maslen, informatics project manager at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "We felt that traditional methods of manual image analysis and annotation were unlikely to cope with the volume and complexity of the data being generated."

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute has chosen to implement Definiens' image-analysis solution Cellenger to help improve the throughput, analysis, and annotation of images generated by these programs. Commercial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute was founded in 1992 as the focus for UK sequencing efforts. The institute is responsible for the completion of the sequence of approximately one-third of the human genome as well as genomes of model organisms such as mouse and zebrafish, and more than 90 pathogen genomes. In October 2001, new funding was awarded by the Wellcome Trust to support a new range of postgenomic programs designed to understand the biological function of genes and their relevance to our health. These programs are built around a faculty of more than 30 senior researchers.