Genome Designs Receives Seed Financing and Starts Operation
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Genome Designs, Inc. has announced that it has received seed financing from undisclosed private investors and started operation.
Founded by veterans of Argonne National Lab, NCBI, Integrated Genomics and Ariadne, the company is taking on the challenge of functional annotation of the next-generation sequencing projects for the life science community.
"Our long-term focus on knowledge aggregation and software development allowed us to create an array of proprietary tools (GD Annotation Suite) and a unique skill set, enabling us to quickly and reliably reconstruct the core metabolic machinery and regulation mechanisms for newly sequenced organisms", said Natalia Alexandrova, CEO at Genome Designs.
Alexandrova continued, "We provide services and create tools for functional annotation, metabolic reconstruction and engineering, and license our patented metabolic designs to bioproduction, food and pharmaceutical companies".
Evgeni Selkov, PhD., Chief Scientific Officer at Genome Designs, commented: "Automatic genome annotation, which considerably picked up in the era of Next Generation Sequencing, causes errors from fused or frame-shifted ORFs to propagate and accumulate in the databases. It results in BLAST outputs filled with perfect matches among "Putative Uncharacterized Proteins". This problem is well recognized within the genomics community. To aid in the effort, Genome Designs plans to publish complete functional annotations for a number of model genomes to help build a "golden standard" for genome annotation. These genomes can be later used to more or less automatically propagate more precise and standardized function assignment over the philogenetic tree".
