AARHUS, Denmark – This week, in an independent experiment, Dr. Nick Loman from the University of Birmingham, looked at de novo assembly of E.coli data from a single run with approximately 10x coverage from Ion Torrent’s Personal Genome Machine (PGM™). The experiment compares several commercial and open source de novo assemblers, and in this experiment CLC Genomics Workbench is not only the fastest assembler, but also has the highest N50 value.

Dr. Loman revealed these findings in his ‘Pathogens: Genes and Genomes’ blog, where he writes, “I was shocked by just how quick the commercial offerings were – particularly CLC – despite running on a laptop less powerful than the server. N50 is a much better guide to comparing “contiguity”, and CLC Genomics Workbench and Newbler give the highest values here.”

Recently, CLC bio has released an update of their flagship application, CLC Genomics Workbench, as well as of their award-winning enterprise platform, CLC Genomics Server, which includes a dedicated import tool that supports Ion Torrent data in both fastq and sff formats.

“We’re globally experiencing a lot of interest from our customers around Ion Torrent’s new sequencer, so it’s very positive to see us perform well in an independent experiment like this.” states Director of Global Sales at CLC bio, Michel Seidelin, PhD. He continues, “As part of our overall strategy, we’re of course supporting the new Ion Torrent platform data, just like we support Illumina, Roche 454, and SOLiD from Life Technologies. We’re the only entity to offer cross-platform compatibility across all major sequencing platforms, including the ability to do hybrid assemblies and mappings.”

As part of the Ion PGM Sequencer Grant Program, the University of Birmingham has been announced as one of the award winners on February 18, 2011, and has been awarded an Ion PGM. Dr. Pallen, Professor of Microbial Genomics at the University of Birmingham, was awarded the grant for his proposal to identify, profile and type the healthcare-associated bacterial pathogens in hospital environments.

Dr. Nick Loman’s “First look at Ion Torrent data: De novo assembly” blog post

http://pathogenomics.bham.ac.uk/blog/2011/05/first-look-at-ion-torrent-data-de-novo-assembly/

About CLC bio

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