Astrid Research Launches High Performance Bioinformatics Solution For Next Generation Sequencing Data Analysis

Astrid Research Inc. today introduced GenoMiner, its high-performance next generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis computer with easy-to-use bioinformatics applications designed to help lab biologists without deep IT knowledge. GenoMiner comes with a great number of software tools for de novo and reference assembly, as well as many other applications for secondary and tertiary analysis of NGS data. It supports all NGS platforms including ABI SOLiD, Roche 454 and Illumina.

“GenoMiner is a long awaited product by life science researchers that is easy to use and is superbly fast when using SOLiD datasets. In addition, the alignment of SOLiD reads is performed in color space thereby utilizing the strength of two base encoding. GenoMiner can be scaled to perform gapped alignments, thereby identifying insertions/deletions of up to 10 nucleotides, a feature that no other software we have used so far could do.” said Dr. Istvan Nagy, CEO of SeqOmics, a SOLiD System Service Provider company.

GenoMiner offers a world of NGS data analysis possibilities on a single computing platform. The most versatile genomics tools will provide researchers with virtually unlimited range of applications. GenoMiner comes with a user friendly graphical interface with wizard-like pipelines for preprocessing, reference assembly, de novo assembly, ChIPSeq analysis and other miscellaneous bioinformatics tasks. The next version (scheduled for release in early 2011) will also include RNASeq analysis, BLAST and Multiple sequence alignment.

“GenoMiner proved to be an exceptionally useful instrument in the rapid and reliable procession of the huge amount of raw transcriptome data”. said Dr. Gergely Maroti, Head of Biohydrogen Research Group at BAYGEN Institute, the largest genomics research organization in Hungary.

GenoMiner’s exceptional performance lies in its massive hardware and optimized software algorithms. It processes a human short read reference assembly on 83 million reads in only 10 minutes.

GenoMiner will be available globally from October 2010 and sold through its online store. Version W4 with 48GB internal memory sales from EUR 20.000, while the larger – W9 with 96 GB RAM – version starts from EUR 29.000.

For more information visit: www.ngsanalysis.com.

About Astrid Research Inc.
Headquartered in Debrecen, Hungary, Astrid Research is one of the largest bioinformatics companies in Central and Eastern Europe. Astrid conducts extensive research and development activities to create software solutions for research institutions, university labs, pharmaceutical and biotech companies that are involved in genomic research. For more information visit: www.astrid.hu.