Description of organization
Agilent's Life Sciences Group is a $1.5 billion USD company, serving global pharmaceutical companies, biotech organizations, government labs and academic researchers. Agilent provides a wide range of tools to explore the mechanisms of disease and health, drug discovery, agriculture, biofuels and toxicology to name a few of the main disciplines. The company is a leading provider of genomics tools including DNA microarrays, target enrichment systems to streamline next-generation sequencing workflows, and automation systems. For proteomics researchers, Agilent has experienced spectacular growth in liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry systems, software and consumables. Agilent is a leading provider of GC/MS and LC/MS systems and software for the metabolomics community, and its gold-standard GeneSpring bioinformatics platform is driving substantial advancements in Integrated Biology approaches to solving complex biological problems.
Previous experience and profile of staff members
The R&D group that will participate in the research is based in Petah Tikva, Israel and is part of Agilent Laboratories (Agilent Labs), the corporate research lab of Agilent. The Agilent Labs team will be led by Dr Zohar Yakhini, who earned his PhD in mathematics at Stanford University, 1997. He is working in computational biology and bioinformatics since after graduation, with focus on statistical and algorithmic aspects of microarrays and other high throughput measurement technologies. He is currently Master Scientist at Agilent Labs and Adjunct Faculty in the Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa. Dr Yakhini led data analysis work in several early gene expression studies. He then led the development of probe design and data analysis methods and software tools for Agilent's CGH microarray platform. Dr Yakhini's group developed several data analysis tools that are widely used by the genomics community. This includes tools for jointly analyzing data produced by multiple high throughput measurement technologies, taking a systems biology approach and incorporating auxiliary data and information from databases. His current work focuses on design and data analysis aspects of molecular measurement technologies, including high throughput genomics and proteomics. Dr Yakhini is a key contributor to several studies of disease biomarkers. Dr Yakhini served as the Technical Co-ordinator for MultiKnowledge, a FP6 project that focused on developing tools for genomic joint data analysis and their application in disease related studies.
The following staff will participate in Work Package 2 of the project:
Leo Bonilla (Director, Life Sciences Segment Marketing)
Expertise: Integrated Biology Solutions
Leo Brizuela (Director, Strategic Life Sciences Collaborations)
Expertise: Metabolomics
Ben Gordon (Director, Strategic Life Sciences Collaborations)
Expertise: Bioinformatics & Transcriptomics
Involvement:
Nigel Skinner (Director, Strategic Pharmaceutical Collaborations)
Expertise: Systems Toxicology
Webpage
Five recent publications relevant to the project
1. Ravid Straussman, Deborah Nejman, Douglas Roberts, Israel Steinfeld, Barak Blum, Nissim Benvenisty, Itamar Simon, Zohar Yakhini, Howard Cedar, Dvelopmental programming of CpG island methylation profiles in the human genome. Nature Struct Mol Bio. Apr 2009
2. Eran Eden, Roy Navon, Israel Steinfeld, Doron Lipson, Zohar Yakhini, GOrilla: a tool for discovery and visualization of enriched GO terms in ranked gene lists. BMC Bioinformatics. 2009 Feb 3;10:48
3. Israel Steinfeld, Roy Navon, Diego Ardigò, Ivana Zavaroni, Zohar Yakhini, Clinically driven semi-supervised class-discovery in gene expression data, Bioinformatics. 2008 Aug 15;24(16):i90-7.
4. Enerly E, Steinfeld I, Kleivi K, Leivonen SK, Aure MR, Russnes HG, Rønneberg JA, Johnsen H, Navon R, Rødland E, Mäkelä R, Naume B, Perälä M, Kallioniemi O, Kristensen VN, Yakhini Z, Børresen-Dale, miRNA-mRNA integrated analysis reveals roles for miRNAs in primary breast tumors. PLoS ONE 2011.
5. Eran Eden, Doron Lipson, Sivan Yogev, and Zohar Yakhini, A Novel Approach to Motif Discovery with Applications in Transcription Factor Binding and Methylation Data Analysis. PLoS Computational Biology, 2007.
