Downloads and Upgrades

As part of its new SOLiD3 Plus sequencing system, Life Technologies has released BioScope, software that provides an "integrated framework for data analysis,"

GenBank 174.0 is available via FTP from the National Center for Biotechnology.

The new release contains 108,560,236,506 base pairs of non-whole-genome-shotgun sequence and 149,348,923,035 base pairs of WGS sequence. Uncompressed, the new release flatfiles require roughly 416 GB (sequence files only) or 445 GB including the 'short directory,' 'index,' and the *.txt files.

The total number of sequence data files increased by 31, and the number of index files by three with this release.

A new haplogroup qualifier, which is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor with a SNP mutation, has been introduced as of this GenBank release.

NCBI noted that because GSS sequences are maintained in two different systems, there is a "discrepancy between the filenames and file headers" for 78 of the GSS flatfiles in release 174.0.

NCBI has also released Blast 2.2.22, which includes new Blast+ command-line applications built with the NCBI C++ toolkit.

Other changes include a new entrez_query command line option for restricting remote BLAST databases, user interface improvements to windowmasker, a provision for long words with blastp, and added support for best-hit algorithm parameters in strategy files.

Temis has launched Luxid 5.1, the latest version of its content mining application that has been enhanced so it is easier-to-use, with "more powerful analytics."

Luxid 5.1 offers content enrichment capabilities through Temis' new software-as-a- service offering. The application also has an enhanced knowledge browser, with "wider" methods to customize Skill Cartridges to include "vocabulary lists and entity attributes, combining them with semantic rules," the company said.

Tripos has released version 5.0 of its Benchware Discovery 360 platform, which includes expanded data access and analysis capabilities with "full featured forms-based querying and browsing, a data access dashboard for data searches, and a range of integration options," the company said.