Rockville, Maryland - CosmosID® today announced it has added GENIUS® Metagenomics to BaseSpace® Apps, the Illumina applications store and informatics community dedicated to advancing genomic analysis.
Rapid and accurate identification of bacteria, including pathogens, is essential to disease control, prevention, and treatment, microbiome analysis, food safety, quality assurance, environmental monitoring, and health and wellness.
The GENIUS Metagenomics application employs CosmosID's curated genome database and high performance algorithms to obtain, in just minutes, accurate and actionable bacterial identification at the species, subspecies, and/or strain level.
"As the NGS market continues to expand and replace culture methods with whole genome shotgun sequence analysis, the CosmosID GENIUS product will enable Illumina customers to obtain results superior in speed, accuracy and precision," said Brian Nimmo, President and CEO of CosmosID.
GENIUS Metagenomics identifies the entire bacterial population in a shotgun metagenomic sample within minutes, including discriminating pathogens from closely related species. This is accomplished even when an organism is present at low concentration and without requiring prior knowledge of diversity, complexity, or community composition of the sample. In brief, GENIUS Metagenomics provides accurate bacterial identification.
BaseSpace users can upload sequencing reads directly from an Illumina sequencer, local storage, or the Sequence Read Archive to the BaseSpace cloud and analyze their metagenomic data using the GENIUS Metagenomics application. After the analysis is completed, a report containing accurate bacterial identification to strain as well as its relative abundance is provided. An interactive visual graph of the results is included. "This essentially revolutionizes the process of microbial identification," according to Dr. Rita Colwell, Founder and Chairman of CosmosID.
Informatics solutions available through BaseSpace Apps allow customers to utilize the tools from a growing community of academic, commercial, and open source providers.
About CosmosID
CosmosID®, based in Rockville, Maryland, is a bioinformatics company focused on rapid identification of microorganisms for molecular diagnostics, public health, food safety, agriculture, and environmental applications. The CosmosID GENIUS solution uses proprietary sequence analysis algorithms to accurately profile all microorganisms in a metagenomic sample employing next-generation DNA sequencing reads. CosmosID was founded in 2008 by Dr. Rita Colwell, former director of the National Science Foundation and currently Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University. CosmosID employs a team of expert genomics scientists, bioinformaticians and software engineers to continuously improve the GENIUS solution with innovation and expertise. To learn more please visit www.cosmosid.com.