Following an overwhelming reception of CLC Genomics Workbench 1.0, CLC bio is happy to announce the release of its next major version of their flagship product: CLC Genomics Workbench 2.0. Additionally, CLC bio has taken another important step in leading next generation sequencing data analysis by becoming an Illumina Connect partner. Illumina Connect is a bioinformatics software partnership program established by Illumina, Inc. to advance data integration and analysis. “CLC Genomics Workbench 2.0 provides scientists using Illumina’s Genome Analyzer with advanced downstream analysis,” says Jordan Stockton, Marketing Manager for Computational Biology at Illumina. “Not only is it fast, but the new version of CLC Genomics Workbench offers alignment and assembly functionality that previously required larger investments in computer hardware. With its intuitive graphical interface, this application provides a simple desktop solution to biologists who might otherwise require the assistance of a dedicated bioinformatics professional.” As an Illumina Connect partner, CLC bio has access to information in the ongoing development of Next Generation Sequencing tools, ensuring that CLC bio’s solutions will be able to fully support Illumina’s tools, including new releases. Director of Scientific Software Solutions at CLC bio, Dr. Roald Forsberg states, “This release is inspired by the great advances in human genetics that are being powered by Next Generation Sequencing technologies, like Illumina. Large scale projects like the Cancer Genome Project and the 1000 Genomes Project are creating a vast amount of data that will transform biomedical research. However, before the revolution in human genetics can be fully realized by the research community there is a dramatic need for bioinformatics solutions that will allow biomedical researchers to handle and analyze sequencing projects at the human genomics scale – something we aim to solve with this and upcoming releases.” CLC Genomics Workbench 2.0 will include several prominent new features, among these: — A new and extremely fast algorithm for the assembly of short reads — Lowering of the memory requirements that makes it feasible to perform reference assembly against all human chromosomes on a standard computer — Easy masking of genomic regions such as repeat or coding regions to lower the genomic complexity and facilitate the fast mapping of CHiP-seq data or exon captured data — Easy combination of data across platforms and experimental protocols so that e.g. single read and paired ends data are easily combined into one analysis CLC Genomics Workbench is the first and only comprehensive analysis package which can analyze and visualize data from all major NGS platforms, such as Illumina’s Genome Analyzer, SOLiD by Applied Biosystems, 454 GS flx by Roche, and HeliScope by Helicos. CLC Genomics Workbench is platform independent, running on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux – including 64bit versions. To read more about CLC Genomics Workbench go to: www.clcbio.com/genomics