Agilent Technologies, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., and Houston, Texas-based Baylor College of Medicine have opened the Agilent Technologies Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence as part of the Alkek Center for Molecular Discovery and the Baylor College of Medicine Core Laboratory in the college's department of molecular and cellular biology.

"Our collaborative relationship with Baylor and our shared investment in this new center will foster development of advanced research tools and new applications in metabolomics and integrated biology," said Carl Raimond, Agilent vice president of sales and field operations, Americas Life Sciences.

"The growing significance of metabolomics, not only in life science research but in many application spaces, has resulted in the need for more analytical capabilities," said Arun Sreekumar, co-director of the Alkek Center. "Baylor and Agilent have identified several areas of mutual interest-metabolomics, lipidomics, clinical research and disease research where we believe we can make real progress together."

Agilent is equipping the new center with two systems configured for metabolomics: an Agilent 6495 triple quadrupole LC/MS system and an Agilent 6550 iFunnel quadrupole time-of-flight LC/MS system with a switchable GC APCI interface. The systems include Mass Hunter software for qualitative and quantitative analysis, as well as Mass Profiler Professional with Pathway Architect for bioinformatics and integrated multi-omic analysis.

Baylor and Agilent will use the equipment collaboratively to analyze samples, conduct research and train students. Both parties have enjoyed a long-standing scientific relationship, which has resulted in several published application breakthroughs in cancer metabolomics.