From the Human Genome Project to NGS
The GenomeQuest Engine was started by the company’s Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Jean-Jacques Codani, in the 1990s to support the Human Genome Project. Since then, he and his French team have contributed more than 150 man-years of Computer Science and Molecular Biology expertise to advancing this core technology which now offers market-leading, high-performance capabilities, including:
- Comparison and management of genomic sequences with native database-to-database compare
- A unified sequence and annotation data model
- Multi-algorithm alignment and comparison including gapped, non-gapped, and local/global alignments
- Universal support for all sequencing platforms and inherent support for SAM/BAM
- “Embarrassingly parallel”: multi-threaded and distributed
- Interactive sequence/result querying, sorting, grouping, formatting, and saving
- Results reusable as input sequence databases
- Linkable databases: viewing multiple databases as one virtual database
- A complete and expressive scripting language, designed for genomics
- Co-developed software/hardware architecture with SGI that offers genome-center scale and whole/multi-genome analysis


