NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Golden Helix and Expression Analysis today announced they will be developing a cloud-based analytic solution to increase adoption of RNA sequencing.
The firms have built a solution "in which bioinformatic processes will be performed in a service-based cloud compute environment," they said, adding that the product will provide cloud-based and integrated desktop analysis tools that are "scalable, affordable, and simplified."
Financial and other terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.
Wendell Jones, vice president of statistics and bioinformatics for Expression Analysis, said in a statement that while the high cost of RNA sequencing has come down "significantly," the downstream workflow, including bioinformatics, data storage, and processing, remains challenging.
"In many ways, RNA-Seq has not been accessible to the broader community of researchers who are comfortable with the infrastructure they've used for many years in working with microarrays," Jones said. "Our collaboration with Golden Helix changes this."
The partners will deliver sequence reads and alignment results through the cloud where they are stored. Researchers ready to analyze that data will be provided with Golden Helix's differential expression workflows that have been optimized for RNA-Seq data in its SNP & Variation Suite. Additional workflows for DNA variant analysis and genetic association testing will also be provided.
In addition, Expression Analysis customers will be provided access to a complementary, desktop-based genome browser from Golden Helix that is designed to supplement the analytic workflows offered on the cloud.