Lab7 Systems Launches BioBuilds, SeqSigma, and DashO3 to Accelerate and Streamline Genomic Data Processing

Lab7 Systems, Inc., announced that it has released a free software toolkit and new service offerings for the next-generation DNA sequencing (NGS) bioinformatics community, along with the latest beta version of its Lab7 Dashboard.  BioBuildsTM is a reference collection of Open Source bioinformatics tools for genomics, pre-built for Linux and Mac OS X platforms.  It eliminates the need for users to maintain and build their own versions of these tools.  By providing binaries, BioBuilds also enables users to easily reproduce results by removing version dependencies on underlying software, since all tools in BioBuilds will be pre-built for those binaries.

"Open Source software is important for bioinformatics", said Chris Mueller, Ph.D., Lab7 Systems’ President and Chief Technology Officer.  "However, building and maintaining Open Source tools can be a time consuming process.  We maintain internal builds of many analytical tools and we feel that making our builds freely available is a good way to give back to the genomics community."

BioBuilds is being released in conjunction with the second Public Beta of the Lab7 Dashboard, the company’s comprehensive software platform for managing sequencing projects, workflows, and pipelines.  This release includes the Production Pipeline Engine, a complete sequence analysis pipeline management and report generation system.  The Production Pipeline Engine allows users to easily port existing analysis pipelines into a managed, production-ready environment.  All BioBuilds tools are made readily available in the Lab7 Dashboard, even though the platform is not expressly required to run the tools.

Lab7 Systems also launched its SeqSigmaTM and DashO3TM optimization processes, integral components of the company’s larger suite of custom services.  The SeqSigma process utilizes clients’ sequencing and analysis goals to design and implement cost-effective computational infrastructures that scale with their labs, while the DashO3 pipeline optimization process identifies computational and dataflow bottlenecks in sequence analysis pipelines and can increase performance by two- to tenfold.

“Everything we’re launching today supports our vision of a streamlined environment for the management and analysis of NGS data,” concluded Dr. Mueller.  “With the tools we’re providing, we know that we can reduce the burden on bioinformaticians, scientists, and clinicians, allowing them to refocus their efforts to accelerate scientific discovery and clinical diagnoses.”