NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Golden Helix today said that it is collaborating with the Harvard School of Public Health to update the school's informatics tool for studying disease heritability in families.
The Pedigree-Based Association Tool was originally developed eight years ago by Christoph Lange at Harvard and offers an extensive array of advanced statistical routines used in the design and analysis of family-based SNP and CNV association studies, said Golden Helix.
A version of the software is available from Harvard free of charge for academic use. But several years ago Harvard granted Golden Helix an exclusive license to develop and distribute a commercial version of the tool.
Now, Bozeman, Mont.-based Golden Helix is working with Harvard researchers to rewrite the original PBAT code with the goal of dramatically improving performance on large-scale data and building a more robust code base that will streamline the implementation of new methods.
"Users will now be able to analyze larger family structures on more than one marker at a time, and with more options for interaction variables, thereby increasing the power to detect disease heritability," Golden Helix VP of Product Development Gabe Rudy said in a statement.