"Y-Science" Software

Computers and software are vital components in the modern laboratory, for presenting and publishing results and data, for the control of equipment, for the acquisition and analysis of data and, increasingly, for the design and execution of experiments. Now, although there are very good commercial packages available for many of these tasks, there is little high-quality software available for more specialist tasks and, when appropriate software is available, it is often extremely expensive.

In our laboratory, we have a team dedicated to design, create and develop applications to address, primarily, the specific needs of our researchers. However, we strive to produce industrially robust software and, with the help of academic and commercial collaborators around the world, our products are increasingly addressing a far wider range of research activities. More importantly, all our software is available to the academic community free of charge, and can be downloaded by following the relevant links (section titles) on this page.

Electrophysiology Software

Henry's EP Suite is a complete, self-contained package for working electrophysiologists. Although originally designed for plant scientists working with guard cell impalements, the software can now be used in many other environments, including patch-clamp (whole-cell and single-channel) and oocyte (two-electrode voltage-clamp) experiments.

Recently, we have forged collaborative links with Scientific Solutions in the USA (the manufacturers of the LabMaster hardware) with a view to providing complete (hardware + software) solutions for the modern, academic research environment.

Plant Biometrics Software

In conjunction with research students from the Ecole Supérieure d'Ingénieurs en Electrotechnique et Electrique in Amiens, France, we have developed the EZ-Rhizo application, which allows for fast and accurate semi-automatic measurement of plants' root system architecture.

Guard-Cell Modelling

We have recently initiated a major systems biology project, with a view to developing an on-line virtual guard cell, which will be capable of predicting real-life, whole plant responses to environmental changes.