Ocimum Biosolutions has announced that will offer free Bioinformatics services focused towards biomedical research in the field of genomics. These services encompass primarily Microarray Data Analysis and Gene Optimization services.

''In an increasingly competitive biotech industry, the time taken for R&D is minimized by concentrating on core activities of the lab. Today with the burgeoning of data, almost every lab has to rely on bioinformatics- the science of storing, retrieving and analyzing large amounts of biological information. Most of the labs either do not have resources, expertise or sophisticated bioinformatics tools to do requisite research," said Anuradha Acharya, CEO of Ocimum.

"To address these issues we decided to provide bioinformatics services to the researchers. These services performed by a team of industry's best Bioinformaticians, Molecular biologists and Statisticians, will greatly help biomedical researchers in the field of Microarray and gene synthesis," she added.

Microarray experiments generate a large amount of data which is difficult for a stand alone computer to handle. Also the intricacies in data analysis leave the user undecided on how to find a correct solution. Ocimum uses high-end servers to work with large microarray data in a fast and efficient manner.

Ocimum provides standard analysis as well as customized analysis of clients' microarray data. Standard analysis includes data normalization, data filtration, handling missing values, handling replicates, clustering and generating comprehensive reports. Customized analysis is done according to user requirements. It's more like an interactive type of analysis. Customized analysis includes all features of standard analysis and also include mapping genes to pathways, finding relationship between genes and metabolites, functional classification of genes, cluster curation and re-clustering, supervised data classification and other user defined requirements. Ocimum analyzes cDNA arrays, Affymetrix and other Oligo chips data. Ocimum uses its own proprietary software Genowiz, for this service.

Use of synthetic engineered genes for production of Genetically Modified Organisms is a technique followed by many scientists today to achieve higher productivity, disease resistance and other desirable traits. Ocimum's in-house analysts can engineer gene sequences based on user-set criteria using its proprietary algorithm.

Ocimum's analysts can engineer sequences for codon-optimization, removal of stable secondary structures, undesirable domains / motifs, or ORFs in alternate frames, and also insert or eliminate restriction sites. All optimizations carried out are based on user-preferences, and rated accordingly. Top 3 sequences that meet as many of the set criteria as possible are finalized on, and a detailed report of the optimizations carried out will accompany each sequence. For this, Ocimum uses its proprietary Optgene software.

These free services are for a month. For microarray data analysis, only 10 samples will be accepted from one researcher. For gene optimization services, only two sequences will be accepted from one researcher, a company release said.