DNASTAR Releases Lasergene 9.1 Software Upgrade

DNASTAR® announced the release of Lasergene 9.1 today as an upgrade with major enhancements to its flagship desktop software suite for molecular biologists. The new release introduces two significant new capabilities: 1) desktop computer support for Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) using next-generation DNA sequence information; and 2) integration of protein sequence, structure and bioinformatic method capabilities in one application.

The major new features supported in Lasergene 9.1 are natural extensions of Lasergene 9, which was released in April 2011. The GWAS functionality builds on a wide variety of tools already available in Lasergene, bringing them together in one workflow to support analysis of one sample, all samples, or any subset when working with multi-sample sequencing data. SNPs can be assessed individually or in groups in the new software and a unique SNP scoring method is being introduced to indicate the relative importance of various SNPs within a given context.

Lasergene 9 introduced Protean 3D as an integrated macromolecular sequence and structure viewer. With Lasergene 9.1, Protean 3D now adds bioinformatic analysis of proteins as well, integrated with the sequence and structure views, all of which can be visualized simultaneously in the software.

Lasergene 9.1 also introduces support for identifying DNA sequence structural variants and it expands the database information available to users to include both dbSNP and COSMIC data for many organisms.

Tom Schwei, Vice President and General Manager of DNASTAR, said, “Lasergene 9.1 is a natural extension of Lasergene 9, which we released just a few months ago. It is uncommon for a software company to be in position to release two significant upgrades within five months. We are pleased that we are able to offer this additional functionality to our customers in such a short timeframe. Through good planning and building on existing capabilities, we have been able to release Lasergene 9.1 for use by our customers as they return from their summer holidays.”