GenomeQuest, Inc, the leader in sequence informatics, announced researchers at the University of California, Davis used its recently announced On-Demand Informatics Solution to process and analyze next-generation sequencing data, successfully leading to identification of a new RNA virus from a declining Syrah grapevine cultivar.

The virus-hunting project was led by UC Davis researchers from Dr Adib Rowhani's lab, under the supervision of Dr Maher Al Rwahnih. The researchers traced the composition and origin of a previously unknown virus that was suspected of causing a declining disease in California Syrah vineyards. This work supports efforts to help the wine industry with vineyard management and grape production.

The researchers used the Roche 454 platform to generate massive data files representing genetic material from samples of healthy and diseased plants. The GenomeQuest team, under the supervision of Dr Jean-Jacques Codani, adapted a bioinformatics workflow to compute, from raw sequence data, a valuable database by grouping and classifying sequences that had high similarity to known organisms. Sequences that did not have a match were grouped in such a manner that helped the researchers to find similarity between potential hidden viruses and known viruses.

UC Davis researchers were then able to access the database via the GenomeQuest web interface to select suspect sequences that did not have high similarities to known organisms, but had kinship with known viruses - ultimately identifying the elusive viral culprit by matching the sequences against those in the specialized viral database. (The UC Davis team will be publishing their findings in an edition of an upcoming peer reviewed journal).

Dr Adib Rowhani at UC Davis, said, "This successful identification of the suspected organism is truly groundbreaking research which will be of great practical benefit to the California wine industry - a fact that is a source of great pride to our UC Davis-based team.

Dr Jean-Jacques Codani, chief scientific officer of GenomeQuest, Inc, said "We are pleased when our platform enables researchers to perform good science. The search for the suspect virus generated a vast volume of sequence data. Our accurate algorithms and interactive GenomeQuest software platform was instrumental in reducing a time-prohibitive computational search and analysis problem into a very efficient and streamlined process. This enabled us to quickly obtain usable output. The success of the UC Davis research team shows that we are at a turn in the genomics revolution whereby scientific problems previously thought to be economically or computationally intractable are now within reach."

GenomeQuest, Inc is the leading sequence informatics company providing applications and services to manage and mine the world's sequence data.