DNASTAR

DNASTAR is a bioinformatics company that provides software for DNA sequence analysis and assembly, including Sanger and next generation sequence assembly and gene expression analysis. See List_of_bioinformatics_companies. The company was incorporated in 1984 and has sold its software in more than 65 countries worldwide. Its primary software product, Lasergene, is used by molecular biology researchers for DNA and protein sequence assembly and analysis. DNASTAR website.

In 1986 the initial version of Lasergene was released. As capabilities were added to the software, Lasergene has become used worldwide in academic, government, pharmaceutical and biotech laboratories. The software supports virtual restriction enzyme cloning as well as TOPO cloning, and cloning using the Gateway technology. Lasergene includes advanced capabilities for BLAST and FASTA search and multiple alignment methods including Clustal. The latest version, Lasergene 8.1, was released in December 2009. Due to DNASTAR's leading role in both sequence analysis and next generation sequence assembly and analysis software, the Company was asked to write a chapter on commercial software for Next Generation Genome Sequencing by Michael Janitz.

In June 2007, the company introduced its ArrayStar software for microarray gene expression analysis. The latest version of ArrayStar, version 3.0, which was released in 2009, included a new module, QSeq, to allow scientists to visualize and analyze RNA-Seq data using the same tools as are used for microarray gene expression.

In October 2007, the company introduced SeqMan NGen to assemble data from Next Generation sequencing platforms. When used along with Lasergene, SeqMan NGen permits researchers to assemble and analyze data from sequencing projects from both traditional and all commercially released next generation sequencing technologies.

In 2008, DNASTAR was awarded a Gold Award by Scientific Computing Magazine for the Lasergene sequence analysis software.

In 2008, scientists from the company contributed a chapter on Next Generation sequence data analysis to the book by Michal Janitz titled “Next-Generation Genome Sequencing”

The 2008 book "Inventing Entrepreneurs: Technology Innovators and their Entrepreneurial Journey” by Gerard George and Adam J. Bock includes DNASTAR as an example of an innovative and entrepreneurial success story.