CLC Bio said this week that it has been tapped to lead a €1.6 million ($2.1 million) comparative genomics project backed by the European Union that aims to develop a software suite that will let users perform gene regulation analysis of large numbers of genomes.
The Comparative Genomics and Next Generation Sequencing, or COGANGS, project will develop the COGANGS engine — a tool that will let users identify and analyze factors that influence gene regulation. The suite will also let researchers investigate how different gene regulation factors influence each other and work in concert.
Participating organizations include Germany's Biobase, Iceland's Decode genetics, Hungary's Alfred Renyi Institute of Mathematics, Russia's BioRainbow, and the UK's University of Oxford.
According to a statement on the COGANGS website, the software is expected to add value to a broad spectrum of research efforts including those in pharmaceutical, biotech, agricultural, and biofuel companies; research hospitals; and universities and governmental research organizations.
In a statement, Gisli Masson, director of bioinformatics at Decode, noted that the project could "potentially unlock a lot of information in the vast collection of human DNA samples" and that both "the initial prototype and the final software package" will be used to analyze genomic regions "that have been identified to have strong disease associations in the human genome."