Pan-European comparative genomics project to develop software suite for gene regulation analysis

Today, CLC bio announced to be heading a pan-European comparative genomics project, COGANGS (Comparative Genomics and Next Generation Sequencing), to develop a software suite, where up to one thousand genomes, can be used as knowledge input in gene regulation analysis.

“The integration of this software suite with our ExPlain data analysis solution and our TRANSFAC database will strengthen our position within the realm of Next Generation Sequencing. It will be a significant advance for understanding gene regulation, to the benefit of our existing and future customers.”

The project is sponsored by the European Union with 1.6 Million Euro, and besides CLC bio, the project involves, BIOBASE (Germany), deCODE genetics (Iceland), Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics (Hungary), BioRainbow (Russia), and the University of Oxford (United Kingdom).

Director of Bioinformatics at deCODE Genetics, Gísli Másson, states, "It's highly interesting for us to participate in this project, as we can potentially unlock a lot of information in the vast collection of human DNA samples we already have, once this project enables us to do large-scale comparative genomics analyses. We will apply both the initial prototype and the final software package for the analysis of regions that have been identified to have strong disease associations in the human genome."

Chief Operating Officer at BIOBASE, Dr. Frank Schacherer, continues, "The integration of this software suite with our ExPlain data analysis solution and our TRANSFAC database will strengthen our position within the realm of Next Generation Sequencing. It will be a significant advance for understanding gene regulation, to the benefit of our existing and future customers."

The COGANGS project will develop a software suite, where a large number of genomes can be used as knowledge input in gene regulation analysis, like analysis of which factors influence gene regulation, how much impact they have on gene regulation, how they can be identified in the genome of interest, how different gene regulation factors influence each other, and how they work in combination. Such software will be able to provide completely new knowledge, and will thus have tremendous value to life science researchers globally.