NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Genomics services provider GeneWiz said today that it will implement several of Edico Genome's Dragen bio-IT processors to improve its ability to analyze next-generation sequencing data for customers of its analysis services.
Edico's Dragen uses field-programmable gate arrays to provide hardware-accelerated implementations of bioinformatics algorithms for tasks such as BCL conversion, compression, mapping, alignment, sorting, duplicate marking, and haplotype variant calling. The platform includes pipelines for whole-genome and exome, transcriptome, joint genotyping, and methylation analysis. Users can also develop and implement custom algorithms on the platform as well as refine and improve existing pipelines.
GeneWiz offers NGS, Sanger DNA sequencing, gene synthesis, and molecular biology services on various sequencing platforms including the Illumina HiSeq X Ten, Pacific Biosciences Sequel system, and 10x Genomics Chromium platform. By adding the Dragen processors to its business, GeneWiz expects to be able to reduce turnaround times for large next-generation sequencing datasets by days without sacrificing the quality of the data or its integrity.
"By adding Dragen to our workflow, we're able to process the sizable amounts of data coming off these sequencers many times faster to accelerate our customers' research projects and discoveries," GeneWiz Chief Informatics Office Ethan Ge said in a statement.
Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.