Waterloo, ON, Canada- Bioinformatics Solutions Inc. announces the launch of next generation sequencing software, ZOOM Studio 1.3, in a user-friendly GUI, integrating the short sequence mapping, result display and post-analysis tasks.

For the mapping task, the new architecture of ZOOM can automatically schedule large volumes of data on a standard PC or across multiple computers with multiple cores. As before, ZOOM supports nucleotide reads from Illumina/Solexa instruments and color space reads from ABI SOLiD instruments, allowing both mismatches and insertion/deletions for single-end and paired-end data sets with read length from 15bp to over 200bp. ZOOM now introduces a unique framework to construct efficient spaced seed sets capable of achieving 100% sensitivity for a large range of read lengths and mismatch numbers.

Mapping results are presented clearly, complete with tools for zooming in and out (from the read depth overview along the reference sequence to read alignment details). Read depth peaks are useful for easily locating interesting mapping clusters.

For post-analysis, ZOOM assembles mapping results into a haploid or diploid consensus sequence. Potential SNP and short INDEL sites are reported, ready for navigation along reference sequences, adopting various user specified filtering criteria. Further, mapping results can be exported in BED and GFF formats, as well as the WIG format to aid in further study with the UCSC genome browser.