Eventual aim of Geneious software is to enable biologists to complete meaningful 'year long' research in 48 hours by eliminating drudgery from current data search, organisation and analysis.
Biomatters has released a new software system that speeds up research in molecular biology and genomics.
The software package, 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.
Alexei Drummond, one of the writers of the Geneious software developed by Biomatters in Auckland, says the eventual aim is to enable biologists to complete meaningful 'year long' research in 48 hours by eliminating drudgery from current data search, organisation and analysis.
"Our guiding ambitions have been to speed up research, make it possible for scientists using the public biological databases such as NCBI to collaborate much more successfully and keep abreast of new relevant information," he says.
Scientists can download Geneious without charge.
Key features and benefits: Geneious 0.9 beta provides an intuitive user interface for searching, sorting and storing biomolecular sequence data and scientific publications, including the following features:.
A local database to store sequences and publications.
Storage of abstracts and bibliographic information.
Direct links to Google scholar.
Storage of sequence data, including user-defined meta-information.
Rapid sequence similarity searching within a local database.
Direct access to NCBI, Uniprot databases.
A unique ability to refine and filter information on the fly as it downloads.
Ability to automate searches so that the data relevant to specific research is constantly kept up-to-date.
A graphical viewer of sequence annotations such as genes, motifs and primer positions.
A multiple alignment viewer.
Very simple user-friendly interface.
Easy and fast to download, at no cost.
Geneious will grow as Biomatters continues to extend its functionality through open-source upgrades and new features.
The firm will be especially focused on developing analysis tools for sequence alignment and phylogenetics.
It welcomes any and all feedback on current and future features in the product.
Biomatters plans to release version 1.0 of Geneious in early 2006.
