By Julia Karow
This article, originally published May 5, has been updated with additional information from Microsynth.
CLC Bio will provide high-throughput sequencing customers of Swiss molecular biology service provider Microsynth with a license to its analysis software, the company said last week.
Under the agreement, Microsynth, based in Balgach, Switzerland, will provide all customers receiving high-throughput sequencing data with a license to the Danish bioinformatics company's CLC Genomics Workbench software.
According to Christof Wunderlin, head of next-generation sequencing at Microsynth, his firm considered several software vendors and chose CLC Bio because of the variety of analyses it enables and data formats it supports, user-friendliness, relatively low hardware requirement, and price.
Partnering with a software provider became necessary because "many customers do not yet have experience with this kind of data and therefore no software in use," he told In Sequence.
Microsynth has been offering sequencing services on the 454 Genome Sequencer FLX platform since early 2008, and Sanger sequencing since 1992. The company uses Roche's software to provide primary data analysis, such as a draft assembly, for the 454 platform, but there comes a point when customers have to analyze the data on their own, Wunderlin said. Roche's GS Assembler, GS Mapper, and GS Amplicon Variant Analyzer are "excellent software," he added, but don't cover more downstream analyses.
According to its website, Microsynth offers a variety of services on the 454 Genome Sequencer FLX platform, including whole-genome sequencing, BAC sequencing, cDNA sequencing, amplicon sequencing, and metagenomics.
The company also offers Illumina sequencing services through a collaboration with Swiss service provider Fasteris, which is "especially interesting for hybrid approaches," Wunderlin said.