Biomatters Limited and New Zealand’s Bioinformatics Institute announce the first release of new Geneious software for grid computing on BeSTGRID, the Broadband enabled Science and Technology Grid running on KAREN, the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network that provides high-speed, high-capacity internet to New Zealand academics, researchers and educators.

The new software allows researchers in New Zealand to use bioinformatics applications on BeSTGRID, taking advantage of high-speed internet access and grid-computing.

The Bioinformatics Institute and Biomatters are working together to make available a complete suite of grid-computing bioinformatics applications for BeSTGRID users, with funding support from REANNZ (Research and Education Advanced Network New Zealand). Additional software releases will take place through 2008. All applications developed under the project will be open source and freely available to researchers in New Zealand. All of the applications will work with Biomatters’ free basic version of Geneious desktop software, as well as Biomatters’ expanded product Geneious Pro.

Biomatters’ Geneious Grid Plugin allows users to seamlessly connect their desktop to BeSTGRID and run the applications from Geneious. Computing jobs act as though they were submitted locally, but the speed of research is greatly accelerated as a result of the offloading of complex calculations to the Grid. Under the project, Biomatters is making the BeSTGRID version of the Geneious Grid Plugin freely available to researchers in New Zealand.

The first grid application available in this release is a version of MrBayes specifically tailored to run on BeSTGRID. This first release also includes a function that allows users to run any other bioinformatics program currently available on the Grid, including ClustalW, BayesPhylogenies, and ModelTest.

Research in the biosciences is undergoing a transformation as a result of huge amounts of information generated in genome projects and other high throughput systems, and increasingly depends upon bioinformatics for the effective organization and analysis of such data and management of experiments. Many of the bioinformatics tools available require significant computing power and computing time, and are prime candidates for grid computing.

Geneious is an integrated, cross-platform bioinformatics software suite developed in New Zealand by Biomatters for manipulating, finding, sharing, and exploring biological data such as DNA sequences or proteins, phylogenies, 3D structure information and publications. It features sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis, contig assembly, primer design and restriction analysis, access to the NCBI and UniProt databases, BLAST, protein structure viewing, automated PubMed searching, and more.

KAREN and BeSTGRID provide collaborative access to biological data resources and to distributed computing power. The adaptation of Geneious for BeSTGRID gives desktop access to public databases, to standardized workflows or pipelines for data analyses, and to the shared computational capacity of New Zealand’s research network. The combination of Geneious with BeSTGRID overcomes the major limitations of current bioinformatics grid portals by coupling desktop data organization with grid-enhanced data analysis.

BeSTGRID users can go to http://www.geneious.com/default,766,geneious_karen_network_plugin.sm to download a free copy of the Geneious Grid Plugin and MrBayes for BeSTGRID. The Plugins run with Geneious Basic (which is free) or Geneious Pro, which can be downloaded and installed simply by going to the download page at http://www.geneious.com.

Queries about future versions of the client, and requests for additional features, should be directed to Professor Allen Rodrigo (a.rodrigo@auckland.ac.nz), Director of the Bioinformatics Institute and Principal Investigator on the project. Software support is available by contacting support@geneious.com.