Genome Designs - Genome Annotation, Functional Reconstruction, and Metabolic Engineering Services

Genome Designs, Inc. Receives Seed Financing and Starts Operation

WALNUT CREEK, CA - February 7, 2012 - Genome Designs, Inc. today 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. "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".

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About Genome Designs

Genome Designs, Inc. was founded in January 2012 with a mission to help life scientists generate value from their sequencing projects, offering services from functional re-annotation of genomes, through functional reconstruction to metabolic engineering to drug and biomarker discovery and bioproduction groups. This privately owned contract research service company is headed by an experienced team with a good track record in bioinformatics tool development, unique experience in metabolic engineering, a network of scientific collaborators and prior experience in start-up company operations. Using proprietary software tools (GD Annotation Suite) and MPW database, the largest collection of metabolic pathways curated since the 1980s, Genome Designs provides genome annotation, pathway analysis and metabolic engineering services, and licenses metabolic designs to pharmaceutical and bioproduction companies.

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