Two US government agencies have become the first customers to purchase Biomatters’ newly-launched sequence analysis software package, Geneious Server. Building on the desktop sequence analysis software Geneious Pro, it is designed specifically for high intensity computing, such as Next Generation Sequencing (NGS).
Geneious Server lets users offload large sequence analysis jobs to servers and computing clusters, harnessing institutions’ existing computational resources, from the Geneious Pro interface. Full genome assembly can be performed with data generated by Illumina, 454, SOLiD and is compatible with future sequencing technologies.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland have purchased the server to manage their Next Generation Sequencing assembly and analysis workflows. Prior to launch, 12 other institutions were beta testing the server software, including the DeRisi Lab at University of California San Francisco, The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation in Oklahoma, BP Biofuels and the University of Queensland in Australia.
Biomatters’ CEO Candace Toner commented that these early sales are evidence of strong market demand for better tools to manage the huge volumes of sequence data: ‘Rapid advances in Next Generation Sequencing mean that researchers are drowning in data, and that’s ultimately creating bottlenecks for research teams. There’s a growing recognition that user-friendly workflows and integrated software tools are key contributors to increase the quality and efficiency of discovery research.
‘Researchers gain access to the leading peer-reviewed algorithms and common workflow processes as well as faster computing,’ Toner added.
With the Next Generation Sequencing module, users can perform full genome assembly using Velvet, BWA, MAQ and Bowtie, with SOAP2, SAM Tools and TopHat in development. The phylogenetics module is released with Mr Bayes and PhyML algorithms, while PAUP*, BEAST, RAxML, GARLI and SATé are coming soon. The sequence analysis module offers ClustalW, MUSCLE, MAFFT and Mauve Genome alignment with plans for SW, BLAST, HMMER, LastZ and Glimmer.
