Jalaja Technologies' maiden product PLHOST (Peptide Library based Homology Search Tool Fast Alignment), an indigenous bio-informatics software, has successfully completed its performance tests during trial runs at the Indian Institute of Science. The software has also gone through comparative analyses with BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) hosted by the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine in USA.

The application PLHOST was developed at the G N Ramachandran Lab of the Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology (IGIB), an affiliate of CSIR. The software is referred to as IGIB-PLHOST.

The basic concept, used in IGIB-PLHOST for searching a database of protein sequences on the basis of composition of oligopeptide sequences is novel. Such a search process is not used in other sequence search software such as BLAST and FASTA (biological sequence comparison program for searching protein and DNA sequence databases).

The approach employed by IGIB-PLHOST is useful particularly because of its innovation as well as scope of high speed search which is important for searching in large genomic and other sequence databases, stated Raja Seevan, director, Jalaja Technologyis Pvt. Ltd.

PLHOST is designed to assign functions to proteins which are the ubiquitous chemicals that govern virtually all processes in organisms like bacteria, plants, humans and viruses. The software is patented in the USA and marketed by Jalaja Technologyis.

The software is priced at Rs. 1.75 lakh for educational institutions which is includes integrated hardware with Peoples Linux. For the corporate sector, it is priced at Rs. 3.5 lakh with hardware and server.