CLC bio announced the release of new versions of the desktop application CLC Genomics Workbench, version 3.6 and the award-winning enterprise platform CLC Genomics Server, version 1.6. With this release, CLC bio's platform is taking yet another major step towards full support for researchers preferring Digital Gene Expression analysis compared to traditional analogue Expression Array analysis.

Associate Professor, Kåre Lehmann Nielsen at Aalborg University said, "My laboratory specializes in digital gene expression analysis by tag-based profiling. Recent developments in DNA sequencing technologies have allowed us to refine this technology to a point where it is much more powerful than traditional analog expression arrays but still price competitive. However, a major obstacle for the uptake of the technology has been the lack of user friendly and computationally efficient software for data handling and analysis. We have worked with CLC bio through all the stages of the development of their new software and I am exited to say that we have now gotten the perfect software which allows us to exploit the full potential of this technology."

Senior marketing manager, Computational Biology at Illumina, Inc, Jordan Stockton, stated, "CLC bio continues to provide fast and user-friendly applications that keep pace with the growing throughput of the Genome Analyzer. This new module for analyzing tag-based expression data addresses a need for intuitive user interfaces that is critical, empowering many biologists to design larger and more sophisticated experiments, thus taking greater advantage of the potential of next-generation sequencing."

Furthermore, the release includes a major expansion to the chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (ChIP-seq) analysis capabilities of CLC Genomics Workbench, as well as a range of smaller improvements.

A select few customers are already using CLC bio's enterprise platform, CLC Genomics Server, which won the Best of Show award at the Bio-IT World Conference in Boston 2009, include the J Craig Venter Institute, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and University of Washington.