“SciDM Group strives to provide computational biologists with fast and flexible data management and bioinformatics tools, capable of keeping the pace with the progress of high-throughput data acquisition technologies, for example, with the recent avalanche of sequencing data,” said Denis Kaznadzey, the leader of SciDM Group. “Our tools are free, most are open source and available for download from public repositories. However, 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”.

SciDM Group’s flagship product, a database management system, is a zero-maintenance object-relational database engine optimized for dealing with extremely large volumes of data. On typical bioinformatics tasks like sequence assembly and clustering, SciDM Data Manager operates thousands of times faster than conventional database engines, including popular commercial brands. Other tools by SciDM Group similarly allow considerable performance optimisation and subsequent gain in speed: QSimScan (Quick SIMilarity SCANner) performs 5 to 100 times faster than standard NCBI BLAST depending on search parameters, and EST pipeline efficiently converts raw transcriptomics data into normalised gene expression profiles.

“Since our beginning of operation, we have seen a considerable interest in our custom genome annotation and metabolic engineering services. However, our potential clients often needed more than that: we experienced a strong demand for custom software tools,” commented Natalia Alexandrova, CEO of Genome Designs. “Originally, such projects have been beyond our scope, but our partnership with SciDM Group will allow us to shorten development cycles and deliver robust systems without changing the focus of the company, and to higher customer’s satisfaction”.

For more information about Genome Designs, visit the company’s website at www.genomedesigns.com, or email info@genomedesigns.com. For more information about SciDM Group, visit www.SciDM.org.

About Genome Designs

Genome Designs, Inc. was founded in January 2012, with a mission to help life scientists generate value from their sequencing projects; from functional annotation and metabolic modelling, to drug development and advancement of bioproduction. This privately owned contract research service company is headed by an experienced team with a good track record in bioinformatics tool development, unique experience in metabolic engineering, a network of scientific collaborators and prior experience in start-up company operations. Using proprietary software tools (GD Annotation Suite) and MPW database, the largest collection of metabolic pathways curated since the 1980s, Genome Designs provides genome annotation, pathway analysis and metabolic engineering services, and licenses metabolic designs to pharmaceutical and bioproduction companies.

About SciDM Group

SciDM Group (Scientific Data Management) aims to bridge a gap between the frontiers in software technology and scientific research. Focused on genomics and computational biology, SciDM develops tools and technologies for efficient and cost-effective management and processing of terabytes of highly structured and heavily interconnected bioinformatics data. Most of the products developed by SciDM Group are open-source or intended to become such. Major projects developed by SciDM Group are: SciDM DBMS - high performance zero-maintenance object-relational NoSQL database engine; EMBEDB - embedded data access library serving as a back-end for SciDM DBMS (open source); QSimScan - ultra- high speed DNA and protein sequence similarity search tool (open source); Transcriptomics pipeline - integrated solution for EST and RNAseq data analysis.