GENALICE B.V today announced the completion of the first customer validation study of the pre-beta version of GENALICE MAP. GENALICE specializes in the design and development of innovative software solutions for DNA data processing and analysis and correlation of biomedical big data. MAP can process raw DNA data, produced by Next-Generation Sequencers, in an ultra-fast, cost-effective and reliable way into a small file for easier manageability and much low-cost storage. Major applications are DNA research and drug development for complex diseases such as cancer.

Hans Karten, Genalice’s Chief Technology Officer said: “In a carefully designed proof of concept study with ambitious validation criteria, the GENALICE MAP development team faced significant challenges set by one of world’s leading agro-industrial crop improvement companies.  Still, in a matter of months, the team managed to finalize the technical development of the software tool in such way that we easily met or exceeded the set criteria for each specific dataset-reference combination.”

He continued: “GENALICE MAP output files showed the demanded high concurrence with BWA aligned data; but was up to 60 times faster, and resulted in a storage footprint reduction of up to 70-fold. GENALICE MAP has been demonstrated to be an ultra-fast, cost-effective and reliable new alignment tool, which is capable of performing well even under the difficult circumstances associated with plant genetics”.

The companies will now start to explore ways to implement GENALICE MAP into the customer’s everyday operations.  Jos Lunenberg, Genalice’s Chief Executive Officer stated: “We are confident that this will lead to a long-term future partnership. This validation clearly shows that MAP is not only suitable to align human NGS data, but also has great benefits when studying plant genomes with many highly repetitive areas”.