Biogemma Ensures the Traceability of its Research with Talend Open Studio

PARIS, France - July 20, 2009 - Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration, announced today that Biogemma, the only European plant biotechnology research company developed and financed by the agricultural world, consolidated a number of applications within a unique system of laboratory management to facilitate tracking samples, and managing users, instruments, stocks, supplies, etc. BioSolution, a Talend Gold Partner, assisted Biogemma in developing and integrating the new system.

“Biogemma wanted to integrate all the laboratory processes previously managed by three applications - Oracle and Microsoft Access databases and Excel worksheets used for monitoring activities,” said Guillaume Kerboul, Founder and Chairman of BioSolution. “All this data is used within the scope of research work relating to plant genes - physiology and phenotypic analyses, studies on the functions of a gene, plant selection, etc. The data was derived from both Biogemma studies and the public domain, and describes nearly 200,000 plants produced in the last ten years and approximately 10,000 genes or sequences. Around thirty characteristics describe each element (name, bibliography references, DNA sequences, information on the functions of sequences, etc.).”

Integrating these applications required the recovery of historical data covering a period of 10 years. Given the exponential expansion of this information, the applications previously developed internally showed their limitations both in terms of scalability, as well as performance and reliability. BioSolution suggested that Biogemma implement Talend Open Studio to organize the migration and recovery of its data, and to create semi-automatic data processing. BioSolution cited a number of reasons for this - ease of access and development (graphic interface), cost control, speed of development, and compatibility with Perl and Java, which are widely used within Biogemma.

In addition to the recovery of historical data, BioSolution used Talend Open Studio to generate Perl code in order to process Excel files, automatically generate data, and integrate it for statistical analyses.

Productivity, rapid development, quality

In addition to the productivity gains already mentioned, BioSolution emphasizes several benefits provided by Talend's open source data integration solution. First is the accelerated development time, which has allowed migrating data from previous applications in less than 7 weeks. “With manual scripts, we needed at least 4 to 5 months to achieve the same results, but with fewer quality guarantees,” said Guillaume Kerboul. “In fact, the improved quality of the work is a second major benefit we realized with Talend. Today, we know that the data is reliable and the risks of error are completely under control.”

The tool is now in production at Biogemma and completely meets the requirements expressed at the start of the project - traceability, speed, simple extraction of information, and analysis. “The project is a success and that wasn't necessarily a foregone conclusion - at the beginning, several users believed that the recovery of all data was impossible! And yet we managed it. I believe one of the keys to this success lies in the time we spent with end users in order to verify and test jobs. Also, Talend helped us solve important semantic issues by homogenizing data via deduplication and data quality functions. Other data integration projects are under review. As Biogemma operates more than 150 applications and 70 databases, the number of potential projects is significant. And, with Talend, we know that we will reach our goals.”

About Biogemma

Today Biogemma is the only European plant biotechnology research company developed and financed by the agricultural world, The company's shareholders comprise specialists in plant breeding and representatives of major French plant sectors: the cooperatives Limagrain and Euralis, and companies such as RAGT, Sofiprotéol, and Unigrains with its technical institute, Arvalis. Biogemma has two research centers in France and more than 80 researchers and technicians specialised in genetic engineering, cellular and molecular biology, bioinformatics, functional and structural genomics, and plant physiology and pathology, and sharing a single goal: improving plants to advance agriculture.

About BioSolution

Created in 2006 and located in the heart of the Génopole® biopark in Evry, BioSolution provides consulting and integration services to biotech infrastructures which want to implement IT solutions within research teams and that will promote innovation. The company uses its broad expertise in the biotech field as well as a network of specialised partners able to respond rapidly to specific issues. BioSolution also has extensive experience in monitoring biological data flows, from their acquisition or production in the laboratory to processing and dissemination. For more information: www.biosolution.fr.

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