Chr Hansen selects CLC Bio bioinformatics platform

Chr Hansen is a supplier of bioscience-based ingredients to the food, health and animal feed industries, producing cultures and dairy enzymes, probiotics and natural colours.

Martin B Pedersen, senior manager - physiology, innovation at Chr Hansen, said: 'Our pipeline takes advantage of the bioinformatics suites from CLC Bio and Genostar, combined with tools developed by our own scientists.

'Over the past years we have acquired almost 200 genome sequences of our most important lactic acid bacteria, including most production strains.

'The genome sequences contain the genetic codes, in other words genes, which define the properties of the strains - and thus the cultures we sell to our customers.

'It is therefore of the utmost importance that we can extract as much information as possible.

'This platform allows us to understand and improve our strains in a more directed way, including deciphering the mode of action of new strains and ensuring IPR,' Pedersen added.

Chr Hansen has always had a strategy that the competencies to carry our such central analyses should reside within the company, and set up two bioinformatics projects to expand into analysis of next-generation sequences.

Now, the company can assemble raw next-generation sequencing data into complete metabolic maps of its strains.

This can be used to search for unwanted genes, for instance genes encoding antibiotic resistance, for comparison to other strains, and generation of pan-genomes, in other words the genetic content of an entire species.

Chr Hansen is using CLC Bio for assembly of the next-generation sequencing data and metabolic pathway builder and Koriblast from Genostar for the more gene-orientated analyses, such as gene finding, annotation, comparative genomics and metabolic mapping.

Seamless connection between the CLC Bio and Genostar platforms offers the benefit of using both platforms in different stages of the next-generation sequencing pipeline.