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XCMSplus Metabolomics Analysis on R@CMon

At the start of 2017, the R@CMon team had its first user consultation with Dr. Sri Ramarathinam, a research fellow from the Immunproteomics Laboratory (Purcell Laboratory) at the School of Biomedical Sciences in Monash University. Sri and his group at the lab studies metabolomics compounds in various samples by conducting a “search” and “identification” process using a pipeline of analysis and visualisation tools. The lab has acquired the license to use the commercial XCMSPlus metabolomics platform from SCIEX on their workflow. XCMSPlus provides a powerful solution for analysis of untargeted metabolomics data in a stand-alone configuration, which will greatly increase the lab’s capacity to analyse more samples, with faster and easeful results generation and interpretation.

XCMSPlus main login Page, entry point of the complete metabolomics platform

During the first engagement meeting with Sri and the lab, it’s been highlighted that a specialised hosting platform (with appropriate storage and computational capacity) would be required for XCMSPlus. XCMSPlus is distributed as stand-alone appliance (personal cloud) from the vendor. As an appliance, XCMSPlus has been optimised and packaged to be deployed on a single, multi-core and high-memory machine. An added minor complication is that this appliance was distributed in VMWare’s appliance format, which need to be translated into an OpenStack-friendly format. The R@CMon team provided the hosting platform required for XCMSPlus through the Monash node of the Nectar Research Cloud.

Analysis results and visualisation in XCMSPlus

A dedicated Nectar project has been provisioned for the lab, which is now being used for hosting XCMSPlus. This project also has enough capacity for future expansion and new analysis platform deployments. The now R@CMon-hosted (and supported) XCMSPlus platform for the Immunproteomics Laboratory is the first custom XCMSPlus deployment in Australia. Due to being the first in Australia, there were some early minor issues encountered during its first test runs. These technical issues were eventually sorted out due to collaborative troubleshooting efforts from the R@CM team, the lab and the vendor. And after several months of usage, hundred of jobs submitted and processed by XCMSPlus, and counting, the lab is continuing to fully integrate it as part of their analysis workflow. The R@CMon team is actively engaging with the lab for supporting its adaption of XCMSPlus and planning for future analysis workflow expansions.

HIVed Database on R@CMon

Measuring the changes in gene expressions levels and determining differential expressed genes during the processes of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, replication and latency is instrumental in further understanding HIV infections. These measurements or studies are vital in developing strategies for virus eradication from the human body. Dr. Chen Li, a research fellow from the Immunoproteomics Laboratory at Monash University has developed a novel compendium of comprehensive functional genes annotations from genes expressions and proteomics studies. The genes in the compendium have been carefully curated and shown to be differentially expressed during HIV infection, replication and latency.

The HIVed Online Database, Front Page

The R@CMon team assisted with the deployment of the online database – HIVed on the Monash node of the NeCTAR Research Cloud. The system has been running on R@CMon and serving the public community for more than a year. HIVed is considered to be the first fully comprehensive database that combines datasets from a wide range of experimental studies that have been carefully curated using a variety of experimental conditions. The datasets are further enriched by integrating it with other public databases to provide additional annotations for each data points. The HIVed online database has been developed to facilitate the functional annotation and experimental hypothesis HIV related genes with an intuitive web interface which enables dynamic display or presentation of common threads across HIV latency and infection conditions and measurements. The work done for the development of HIVed has been recently published into Scientific Reports and the Immunoproteomics Laboratory has plans to incorporate new experimental studies and external annotations into the HIVed database as they become available.