Geneious Available for Grid Computing

In collaboration with The Bioinformatics Institute New Zealand (http://www.bioinformatics.org.nz) at the University of Auckland, Biomatters developed their Geneious software for grid computing on BeSTGRID, the Broadband enabled Science and Technology Grid running on KAREN, the Kiwi Advanced Research & Education Network that provides high-speed, high-capacity internet to New Zealand academics, researchers and educators. The two organisations worked together to make available a suite of grid-computing bioinformatics applications for BeSTGRID users, with funding support from both the Government's Capability Build Fund administered by REANNZ and TelstraClear Ltd. All of the applications work with Biomatters' free basic version of Geneious desktop software, as well as Biomatters' expanded product Geneious Pro. The Geneious Grid Plug-in allows users to seamlessly connect their desktop to BeSTGRID and run the applications from Geneious. Computing jobs appear as though they were submitted locally, but the speed of research is greatly accelerated as a result of the offloading of complex calculations to the Grid. Under the project, the BeSTGRID version of the Geneious Grid Plug-in is freely available to researchers in New Zealand. Research in the biosciences is undergoing a transformation as a result of huge amounts of information generated in genome projects and other high throughput systems, and increasingly depends upon bioinformatics for the effective organization and analysis of such data and management of experiments. Many of the bioinformatics tools available require significant computing power and computing time, and are prime candidates for grid computing. Geneious is an integrated, cross-platform bioinformatics software suite developed in New Zealand by Biomatters for manipulating, finding, sharing, and exploring biological data such as DNA sequences or proteins, phylogenies, 3D structure information and publications. It features sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis, contig assembly, primer design and restriction analysis, access to the NCBI and UniProt databases, BLAST, protein structure viewing, automated PubMed searching, and more. KAREN and BeSTGRID provide collaborative access to biological data resources and to distributed computing power. The adaptation of Geneious for BeSTGRID gives desktop access to public databases, to standardized workflows or pipelines for data analyses, and to the shared computational capacity of New Zealand's research network. The combination of Geneious with BeSTGRID overcomes the major limitations of current bioinformatics grid portals by coupling desktop data organization with grid-enhanced data analysis.