Ocimum Biosolutions Launches Pharmatracker™

Pharmatracker™ is a multi-platform, multi-user, cost-effective Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) especially suited for pharmaceutical industry. It enables R&D and manufacturing laboratories to perform QA/QC on all inventories and to keep accurate track of samples, reagents, instruments, processes, and output. It provides complete and cost effective solution for implementing a paperless Pharma lab.

Pharmatracker™ is compliant with requirements and guidelines for GxP as stipulated by US EPA, US FDA and WHO. It complies with US FDA’s 21 CFR Part 11 requirements on electronic records and electronic signatures. It meets regulatory requirements on data security and audit trails of an experiment.

Pharmatracker™ has ICH compliant testing and method validation module along with cleaning validation support during product changeover. Other functionality such as workflow, stability, QC batch management and trend analysis tools drastically reduce time and effort of implementation, validation and support.

Genowiz™ 3.0 Released

Ocimum Biosolutions released Genowiz™ 3.0 on July 1, 2005.

Genowiz™ is a powerful gene expression analysis program that has been designed to store, process and visualize gene expression data efficiently. It includes a suite of advanced analysis methods and allows researchers to select analysis methods appropriate for their dataset. Genowiz™ allows researchers to organize Minimum Information About Microarray Experiment (MIAME), import data files quickly and easily, work with multiple experiments at the same time, import gene annotation files, preprocess and normalize data, perform cluster analysis, classify and view gene information, perform functional classification and track intricate correlations in data by performing pathway analysis.

In Genowiz™ 3.0, the initial focus was on changing the internal coding structure. However, several modules have been enhanced, and many new modules have been added. Earlier versions of Genowiz™ lacked backward compatibility. But now, in Genowiz™ 3.0, the internal database architecture of Genowiz™ has been changed to provide backward compatibility in future versions. Some of the new features are:

1. Excellent visualization generating publication quality graphs, expression matrix and dendrograms
2. Many parametric/non-parametric data reduction techniques
3. Advanced normalization techniques (Printip Loess/cDNA Loess/Quantile normalization)
4. Clustering made more interesting with gene shaving, 2D PCA view for clusters, scree plots and enhanced PCA modules
5. Classification options such as Discriminant PCA (DPCA) to classify unknown samples
6. Enhanced pathway network analysis allowing users to create their own pathways with publication details
7. Facility to import and view users' own gene lists
8. Multiple experiment support, enabling users to compare and analyze more than one experiment with single instance of Genowiz™
9. Increased application response time
10. Extensive data handling capacity. As tested at our end, Genowiz™ can now support up to 20,00,000 data points with 1 GB RAM size.

Future:

Genowiz™ Enterprise Edition, scheduled for release in August 2005, will facilitate users to maintain an experimental repository at a remote server.

Genchek™ 2.2 Released

Ocimum Biosolutions released Genchek™ 2.2 on July 20, 2005.

Genchek™ is a comprehensive, yet user-friendly sequence analysis tool with architecture to suit multi-platform and multiple-user-access. In addition to functionalities such as import of sequences in all universally recognized formats, alignments, vector trimming, contig assembly, BLAST, primer design and analysis for ORFs, RE and protease digestion sites, Motifs, and hydrophobicity plots, Genchek™ 2.2 comes with more features to your workbench.

New Features:

1. Local BLAST manager: Using Local BLAST Manager utility, users can create and manage databases and their sequences on any Server. User can now apply the powerful BLAST searches against multiple databases using an ordinary desktop or laptop computer.
2. Gateway Cloning: Genchek™ 2.2 facilitates Gateway® Technology mediated in silico transfer of DNA fragments between cloning vectors, and generation of attB-cassettes through PCR amplification.
3. RE Cloning: Genchek™ 2.2 facilitates in silico construction of new vector molecules through the conventional Restriction Endonuclease-based cloning strategies.
4. Importing .ace files into Genchek™ 2.2: Genchek™ 2.2 is designed to take advantage of the information regarding assembly generated by phrap (e.g., phrap's consensus sequence and quality values, and tags indicating potential assembly problems.
5. Exporting MSA in NEXUS format: Although MSA comes with dendrogram generation and a feature to export MSA as .nex files (accepted by most popular phylogenetics packages as standard), Genchek™ 2.2 users can further analyze data by importing to their own favorite phylogenetic analysis tools.
6. Single strand view of the sequence: Users can now view DNA/ Vector sequences as single-strand, double strand or translation in three-window Graphical Viewer.

Enhancements:

1. Generating and saving PCR Products from Primer Design module
2. Support for BLAST of longer sequences using NCBI BLAST
3. Enhanced Contig Assembly
4. Access to Phred Phrap, Polyphred through Genchek
5. View saved assemblies through enhanced Contig Assembly Viewer
6. Visualize Polymorphisms on the assemblies
7. Access saved assemblies through View Contigs filter
8. Enhanced MSA: Access to ClustalW to carry out multiple sequence alignment and visualization through Genchek™