VisiQuest the basis for Cutting-Edge

Quantitative Data Acquisition Model

 

The State University of New York (SUNY) at its research-focused Stony Brook University campus, uses VisiQuest as part of a NIH-funded research project. Called the “Physiological Model of Gene Regulation in Drosophila,” the project studies animal development by analyzing fruit fly embryos.

Under the direction of John Reinitz from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook, VisiQuest is leveraged to help “visualize” the chemical blueprint for the fly's body as it forms. Specifically, VisiQuest is used to analyze the level of protein made in each cell of the developing embryo. This process enables researchers to simultaneously monitor protein levels in 8,000 simultaneous channels at once, providing a wealth of information about how body segments are generated.

Started in 1989, and funded by the NIH since September of 1992, the project has yielded significant research findings to date, warranting the publication of research papers in Genetics and Nature. Reinitz and the Stony Brook lab have just submitted another paper describing their data acquisition procedure after they discovered that they are using a more advanced method of study than was known to be in use in the field. VisiQuest has been integral to the project since its inception, and is the basis of the lab’s cutting-edge Quantitative Data Acquisition model that it has been creating over the past seven years. VisiQuest was initially selected by Stony Brook because of its sophisticated image processing primitives, as well as its ease of use for application development, combined with its powerful production capabilities.


“VisiQuest has enabled us to not only streamline and speed our research process, but to be innovative in our study because of its ability to provide spatial as well as temporal data on gene expression,” stated Reinitz. “Current methods can only provide either of them at the expense of the other, so this method that we have developed utilizing VisiQuest represents a very significant breakthrough.”

To help support these and other academic endeavors, AccuSoft recently established an Academic Program, giving discounted software to qualified research and classroom projects. For more details on the Academic Program, please click here.

For more information on John Reinitz and the Drosophila project, please click here.