Thursday, April 28, 2011

Product Updates: GeneSifter Lab and GeneSifter Analysis Editions

Spring is here and so are new releases of the GeneSifter products. GeneSifter Lab Edition (GSLE) has been bumped up to 3.17 and GeneSifter Analysis Edition (GSAE) is now at 3.7.

What's New?

GSLE - This release includes big features along and a host of improvements. For starters, we added comprehensive inventory tracking. Now, when you configure forms to track your laboratory processes, you can add and track the use of inventory items.

Inventory items are those reagents, kits, tubes, and other bits that are used to prepare samples for analysis. GSLE makes it easy to add these items and their details like barcodes, lot numbers, vendor data, and expiration dates. Items contain arbitrary units so you can track weights as easily as volumes.

When inventory items are used in the laboratory, they can be included in steps. Each time the item is used, the amount to use can be preconfigured and GSLE will do the math for you. When the inventory item's amount drops below a threshold, GSLE can send an email that includes a link for reordering.

In addition to inventory items we increased support for the PacBio RS, and have made Sample Sheet template design completely user configurable. Sample Sheets are those files that contain the samples' names and other information needed for a data collection run. While GSLE always had good sample sheet support, vendor's frequently change formatting and needed data requirements. In some cases a new software release could be required.

The new sample sheet configuration interface eliminates the above problem, and makes it easy for labs to adapt their sheets to changes. A simple web form is used to define formatting rules and the data that will be added. GSLE tags are used to specify data fields and a search interface provides access to all fields in the database. At run time, the sample sheet is filled with the appropriate data.

View the product sheet to see the interfaces and other features.

GSAE - The new release continues to advance GSAE's data analysis capabilities. Specific features include paired-end data analysis for RNA-Seq and DNA re-sequencing applications. We've also improved the ways in which large datasets can be searched, filtered, and queried. Additional improvements include new dashboards to simplify data access and setting up analysis pipelines.

Finally, for those participating in our partner program, we continue to increase the integration between GSLE and GSAE with single sign on and data transfer features.

More details can be found in the product sheet.

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