h2. Featured Project: TROPIX

Biomedical researchers at the University of Minnesota and at the Mayo Clinic are seeking ways to allow collaborating research groups to efficiently share datasets and data analysis tools. Such capabilities would enable researchers to improve the quality of their work and foster new collaborative research and clinical projects. In 2007, the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) and the Bioinformatics group at the Mayo Clinic received a 2-year grant from the Minnesota Partnership for Biotechnology and Medical Genomics to develop a system to provide these capabilities. This project is called TROPIX.


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TROPIX is MSI's first open source project based on the caGrid software infrastructure. MSI is also developing other projects (ProTIP and the TINT Portal) that heavily utilize the software and infrastructure that was developed during TROPIX. Each project provides unique and complementary features to enable research:



* *TROPIX:* A project to build a federated grid between MSI and the Mayo Clinic. TROPIX enables researchers to securely search for and share data with collaborators and search for and request laboratory services provided at each institution. Laboratories can advertise the services that they offer, assign contacts for those services, and send data or status updates to researchers who have requested service.


* *ProTIP:* Provides researchers with grid services and a pipeline for taking raw mass spectrometry data of biological samples and identify and quantify the proteins present using a variety of 3rd party software.


* *The TINT Portal:* A web 2.0 GUI for interacting with the TROPIX and ProTIP services.
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