NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Bayer CropScience has licensed Persephone, a genome browsing application developed by Ceres, an agricultural biotechnology and seed company.
Ceres said that under the terms of the multi-year software license, it will provide support, customizations, and maintenance services to Bayer. Originally developed for Ceres' in-house use, Persephone lets researchers visualize genetic data at the level of chromosome and at the nucleotide level. Users can also layer and cross reference related information in much the same way geographic mapping services let users add weather information or business locations to geographic maps. The solution also includes proprietary data-compression methods and other optimizations that improve speed and expand the ways researchers can explore and mine genetic data.
"Our company will benefit from implementing this integrated solution" because it allows "interactive querying and integrated visualization of various omics data," Jakob de Vlieg, head of Bayer CropScience's computational life sciences group, said in a statement. He added that Bayer's scientists are also impressed with the system's performance and its user-friendly interface.
Bayer is the second life sciences company to license Persephone from Ceres for internal research purposes. Ceres currently offers Persephone as a client-server installation and is developing a software-as-a-service version that as well. It will launch a beta version of the latter by the end of this year.