Next Generation Sequencing

Today, Bio-IT World’s Editor-in-Chief, Kevin Davies, wrote about our next big move: Launching CLC Genomics Machine at ISMB in Stockholm, one week from now.

CEO at CLC bio, Thomas Knudsen, states

We have gone in a different direction than all other teams developing and refining algorithms for analyzing the massive amounts of data coming from the NGS instruments. Instead of constantly scaling up your hardware to the point where you need very big clusters or a cloud computing setup in order to do de novo assembly of large genomes, our scientific developers started from scratch and thought out some quite clever ways of handling those large amounts of data — to the point where a single CLC Genomics Machine can handle these tasks without breaking a sweat.

Click here to read the entire piece at bio-itworld.com

You can read the official press release here

CLC bio’s enterprise platform for Next Generation Sequencing data analysis, CLC Genomics Server, has just been awarded the “Best of Show” prize at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo 2009 - an award judged by a team of Bio-IT World magazine editors and leading industry experts.

Bio-IT World Editor-in-Chief Kevin Davies, PhD., comments

Each year we go through a process where our judging panel debates the technical merits and likely business impact of the different technologies presented at the Best of Show awards. CLC bio’s success this year clearly reflects the importance of the incredibly exciting Next Generation Sequencing space, with a solution that is obviously gaining traction with it’s capabilities to handle the immense data management and analytical challenges required in this area.

M. Michael Barmada, Ph.D. - member of the “Best of Show” judging panel and Director of the Center for Computational Genetics at the Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh says

Judging on several criteria, such as the importance of the problem being addressed and the elegance of the solution provided, it was clear to the judging panel that CLC Genomics Server, and the flexible plug-in structure it provides, delivers an ideal platform for researchers working with Next Generation Sequencing data. It’s nice to see complex computational algorithms and routines presented with an elegant interface in a user-friendly way, which lowers the technical barriers for all researchers working with high-throughput sequence data analysis.

CLC Genomics Server is CLC bio’s advanced and powerful bioinformatics solution which is built upon a powerful and modern three-tier server architecture, that yields flexible options of executing centralized services, easy integration with other applications and services, powerful database communication and data integration, and secure access control framework and central action logging. Customers already using this enterprise platform, includes J. Craig Venter Institute, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Veridex, and University of California - Berkeley. Read more about this solution.

This news just came through in my inbox - more details later…!

You can read more about the price at Bio IT Worlds homepage.

Yesterday, we published a story that our licenses had run out of stock. In the press release, VP at CLC bio, Jan Lomholdt stated:

We chose a Russian license supplier - Глупая Фабрика (St. Petersburg) - because the Cyrillic alphabet would ensure an extra level of encryption, and thereby be harder to bypass by people with sinister intentions. Things have been working smoothly up to this date, with an adequate number of licenses to meet demands. If we had anticipated this situation, we would of course have increased our inventory. It’s an unfortunate situation, but our Russian license supplier is working around the clock right now in order to have a new batch of licenses ready to be flown to Aarhus - hopefully within this week.

This story is an April Fools’ prank as we have our own license generator in both Aarhus and Boston, so we can’t really run out of licenses. We of course thought it was a funny story, but essentially a prank isn’t funny unless someone believes the hoax. So when GenomeWeb decided to play along and publish the prank as well, things got really funny! Unfortunately they have since removed the article.

After enjoying a good laugh at the office yesterday, we published a retraction today, so no one is in doubt that they in fact can get their licenses from CLC bio pronto. You can read the original prank release as well as the retraction we published today, by clicking here.

Bio-IT World also ran a story on the prank, which you can enjoy right here.

In the latest edition of Nature, Technology Editor, Nathan Blow, PhD, published a Technology Feature on how Next Generation Sequencing is changing gene-expression profiling from analog to digital methods.

Our Director of Scientific Solutions, Dr. Roald Forsberg, was interviewed for the article and shares the vision behind our focus within Gene Expression Analysis - both digital and analog.

I recommend reading the feature, which is really thorough in describing the change from analog to digital gene-expression. You can read it here:
Transcriptomics: The digital generation