CLC bio announced the release of new versions of their premier solutions for analyzing and visualizing Next Generation Sequencing data, the desktop application CLC Genomics Workbench, version 3.5 and the award-winning enterprise platform CLC Genomics Server, version 1.5. With this release, CLC bio is making a major push into epigenomics by supporting chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (ChIP-seq) analysis.

The Director of Scientific Solutions at CLC bio, Dr Roald Forsberg, stated, "ChIP-seq is a very important application of the Next Generation Sequencing technologies and we are proud to offer the first integrated solution which can easily enable researchers to go from raw data, through reference alignment and onto advanced visual and tabular output of ChIP-seq results. Besides taking us into epigenomics, our developers have also done a fantastic job of improving the speed and memory performance of our software making us very confident that we can track performance as data amounts increase."

Furthermore, this release includes a number of new assembly statistics and an expansion of CLC bio's RNA-sequencing tools, including support for native colour space data and more statistical tests.

CLC bio offers the first and only comprehensive analysis solutions for genomics, transcriptomics, and epigenomics, which can analyze and visualize data from all major Next Generation Sequencing platforms, like Illumina's Genome Analyzer, SOLiD by Applied Biosystems, 454 by Roche, and HeliScope by Helicos. CLC Genomics Workbench is platform independent, running on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux - including 64bit versions.

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 the National Institutes of Health (USA).