The beta version of Biomatters’s Geneious 0.9e software has enjoyed enthusiastic endorsement from scientists using it since it was released in December 2005
Daniel Batten, CEO of Biomatters, said the company had quickly achieved the target number of downloads for the beta release of Geneious and were very pleased that researchers welcomed the software’s ability to speed research by eliminating what molecular biologists had said were major frustrations with their current methods for retrieving and analysing sequences and publications.
Using public biological databases such as NCBI, Geneious makes it possible to rapidly search and filter DNA, protein and publication data.
Once the data has been downloaded it can be stored, visualised and analysed.
One senior Australian based researcher emailed one of the lead writers of the software, Alexei Drummond, simply saying: “Bloody nice program!” Over 50% of scientists using the software have been based in Europe, 30% are in North America and 19% are in Australia and New Zealand.
Comments from users include:.“It’s like night and day.
“You guys are ambitious – but given what you've done in the last six weeks, you might just be able to do all this.
…something like a Windows Office for molecular biology” - Barry Hall, emeritus professor, department of biology, University of Rochester, USA.
“….a lot of us have been waiting for something like this for a long time” - Jack da Silva, lecturer in genetics at the School of Molecular and Biomedical Science, University of Adelaide.
“Have tried other things available free on the net but have ended up deleting them off my computer – Geneious is the only thing that has stuck” - Simon Babayan, Institutes of Evolution, Immunology and Infection Research, University of Edinburgh.
"Really nice features, and very user-friendly" - Marcelo Weksler, EPSCoR postdoctoral fellow.
"Really great software" - Jennie Lau - research fellow CRES/Genetics, Zoological Society of San Diego.
"Very sweet program – congrats...
keep up the good work.
“The program is long overdue cross platform tool for both sequence alignments and basic tree construction.
“For a beta release it already has great functionality and an intuitive user interface.
“I am already using it for my research and plan to use it in undergraduate teaching laboratories later this year" - Michael Bunce, biological sciences and biotechnology anthropologist, Murdoch University, Australia.
Drummond said upgrades to the software arising out of user comments included importing users sequence files for alignments and tree building and manual adjustment to the alignment, ability to visually extract a gene or gene-sequence from a sequence and store as a new sequence, visual display of sequence similarity, and the ability to translate regions of nucleotide sequences to amino acid sequences.
Scientists can download Geneious without charge.
Key features and benefits.
Geneious 0.9e beta provides an intuitive user interface for searching, sorting and storing biomolecular sequence data and scientific publications, including the following features.
Your own personal database of organised, searchable sequences and publications.
Abstracts, PDFs and bibliographic information.
Direct links to Google scholar, and the full publication.
Storage of sequence data, trees, alignments and more.
Rapid sequence similarity searching within your own local database.
Direct access to NCBI, Uniprot databases.
Refine and filter information on the fly as it downloads – saving in some cases hours of NCBI page-scrolling.
Automatically search and store new publications and sequences.
Graphical viewer of sequence annotations such as genes, dotplots, motifs and primer positions.
Multiple alignment (no need for tedious cut and paste into FASTA files, then exporting to another alignment program).
Unlimited undo and redo capability.
Intuitive User Interface and easy and fast to download, at no cost.
Biomatters plans to release Geneious 1.0 in April 2006.
