Genome Designs said this week that it has formed a partnership with SciDM Group, a bioinformatics tools developer.
Under the terms of the agreement, the company will use SciDM’s database engine, transcriptomics data processing pipeline, and high-throughput sequence comparison technology to augment its genome annotation pipelines and to boost its custom software development projects.
SciDM's database management system, called SciDM Data Manager, is an object-relational database engine that’s optimized to deal with large volumes of data. SciDM said the system operates "thousands of times" faster than conventional database engines when used on bioinformatics tasks like sequence assembly and clustering.
Genome Designs opened its doors in January and provides manual genome annotation services based on its internal analysis pipeline (BI 2/10/2012).
Natalia Alexandrova, CEO of Genome Designs, said in a statement this week that potential clients of the company’s services have also been demanding “custom software tools” as well.
Creating bespoke software is “beyond our scope,” she said. However, “our partnership with SciDM will allow us to shorten development cycles and deliver robust systems without changing the focus of the company.”
SciDM Group describes itself as "an informal non-commercial association of enthusiastic computational biologists and software engineers." Most of its products are open source.
Denis Kaznadzey, who heads SciDM Group, said that although SciDM's tools are free and available for download from public repositories, “they require integration with the client’s system.”
“Our partnership with Genome Designs goes beyond just another vendor-client relationship: they are planning to provide installation and integration services for our products,” he said.