OpenMSI Wins R&D100 Award

November 17, 2015

Ben Bowen (left) and Oliver Rübel (right).

OpenMSI, the most advanced web-available tool for analyzing and visualizing mass spectrometry instruments (MSI) data was one of seven Berkeley Lab winners of R&D100 awards announced last week.

Oliver Rübel of the Computational Research Division and Ben Bowen of the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division led the development of OpenMSI with collaboration from NERSC.

MSI technology enables scientists to study tissues, cell cultures, and bacterial colonies in unprecedented detail at the molecular level. As the mass and spatial resolution of MS instruments increase, so do the number of pixels in MS images and data size. Nowadays, MSI datasets range from tens of gigabytes to several terabytes. Thus, basic tasks like opening a file or plotting spectra and ion images become insurmountable challenges.

OpenMSI overcomes these obstacles by making highly optimized computing technologies available via a user-friendly interface. Because OpenMSI leverages NERSC’s resources to process, analyze, store, and serve massive MSI datasets, users can now work on their data at full-resolution and in real-time without any special hardware or software. They can also access their data on any device with an internet connection. Learn more about OpenMSI.

About Berkeley Lab

Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab’s facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

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