20 April 2006
Bioinformatics finally gets user friendly
If you can use email you can use Geneious 1.0
AUCKLAND: 19 April 2006. Any scientist who uses email can now embark on novel research once considered advanced
bioinformatics.
Announcing the launch of Geneious 1.0, which is free to scientists, Daniel Batten, CEO of Biomatters, said, “We are
excited about the software and the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response we have had from scientists to making
bioinformatics tasks such as sequence alignment, tree building and sequence analysis user friendly.
“The two most common words in user feedback have been ‘long awaited.’”
The beta version was quickly adopted for university courses in Germany and Australia.
Debuting in the top three of Apple’s “Hot Picks,” it also became the second most downloaded piece of software on Apple's
Math and Science site.
In helping bioinformatics deliver on its promise Mr Batten said the team led by Dr Alexei Drummond aimed to put advanced
computer-based research into the hands of all molecular scientists as a first step towards radically faster and easier
research.
“There’s no shortage of clever algorithms. The problem has been that the majority of scientists can’t access them,” Mr
Batten said.
“The technology is locked up in bespoke systems, or requires specialist skills, or you have to cut and paste across
several applications.
“For example, the workflow of BLASTing sequences, viewing dotplots, conducting multiple alignment, building a
phylogenetic tree and comparing annotations against gene similarity meant accessing specialist expertise or withstanding
lots of repetitive manual operations. But using Geneious this work can all be done in a few clicks.”
At the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hannover students unanimously voted Geneious number one for ease of use.
“Geneious pulls all key functions into the one package,” Mr Batten said.
“Using open plug-in API technology it also quickly incorporates updates. The system’s phylogenetic tree viewer, for
example, represented a lot of academic development but was integrated into Geneious in one day.”
The 1.0 version enables click-and-drag downloads of journals into local libraries, sequence searches on the fly, 3D
protein structure viewing and a new way to view gene annotations and similarity at the same time.
More
Researchers can download Geneious 1.0 free at www.geneious.com
Key features of Geneious 1.0
Geneious 1.0 provides an intuitive user interface for searching, sorting and storing biomolecular sequence data and
scientific publications, including the following features:
- Phylogenetic reconstruction (NJ with bootstrapping) & tree viewing
- Multiple & pairwise sequence alignment
- Sequence alignment
- Fast dotplots
- Sequence viewing, including sequence annotations from NCBI database from DNA to amino acids and reverse complements
- Export to Endnote, Nexus, Newick, Fasta
- Import trees, sequences, alignments and bibliographies in a variety of formats
- Adding user information and notes to sequences, alignments and trees
- NCBI Blast
- 3D protein structure viewing
- Fast local database searching
- PDF full text searching of publications
- Unlimited undo and redo capability
- It’s free for academic use
Geneious
Geneious puts core bioinformatics functions within the reach of all molecular biologists and biochemists in an
application that is as easy to use as email.
Geneious does sequence alignment, 3D structure visualization, phylogenetic tree building, sequence analysis,
publication-search and more; all in a single application.
www.geneious.com
Biomatters Ltd
Biomatters combines statistical, biological and computational knowledge with user-friendly front-ends to create research
platforms that greatly speed up the processes of scientific and medical discovery. In our first two years Biomatters has
launched two software packages. www.biomatters.com
ENDS