Knome said this week that it has been contracted by Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine to provide informatics services and software tools for a JHU-led study focused on finding genetic variants linked to asthma in African American and African Caribbean populations.
Knome will use its platform to annotate data from 1,000 genomes contributed by 15 academic research centers across the United States, the Caribbean, and South America as well as from four research sites in Western Africa as part of the study.
Additionally, JHU researchers will use the company’s informatics tools to shortlist candidate causal variants, genes, and gene networks, Knome said.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based company spun out its new informatics software-as-a-service product called KnomeBase last November, for clients that require only genome interpretation services. Its toolkit includes KnomeVariants, which is a query tool for finding candidate causal variants, and KnomePathways, a visualization tool that overlays genomic variants onto gene interaction and co-expression networks to help users identify functional interactions between variants (BI 12/22/2011).