August 30, 2021, Madison, WI

DNASTAR® announced today the release of Lasergene® 17.3, which includes new features and functionality focused on genomic analysis and variant identification supporting COVID-19 research. The new version of Lasergene also incorporates significant updates to the sequence alignment and sequence assembly applications offered by DNASTAR.

In response to customer feedback, DNASTAR has expanded their viral genome analysis workflow to support PacBio and Oxford Nanopore long reads, including data from PCR-amplified fragments generated using the ARTIC Network protocols. Users with data from ARTIC protocols can now take advantage of a custom algorithm in SeqMan Ultra to quickly assemble their sequenced amplicon data against a SARS-CoV-2 reference sequence and easily evaluate variants.

For those who already have draft genomes assembled, Lasergene 17.3 offers the new MAFFT7 algorithm in MegAlign Pro for quickly aligning thousands of viral genomes to known strains. Additional enhancements include significant improvements to distance tables, making it easier to identify groups of interest in large data sets.

A full list of enhancements and updates can be found in the Lasergene 17.3 release notes.

Shawn Grass, General Manager at DNASTAR, said, “During this past year, we have remained in close contact with our customers, and based on those conversations, decided to pivot our development process for Lasergene 17.3 to focus specifically on making it easier to accomplish work being done in response to the global pandemic. With the release of Lasergene 17.3, we are pleased to have responded to our customers’ needs and will continue to do so.”

About DNASTAR
DNASTAR, Inc., Madison, Wisconsin, (www.dnastar.com) is a pioneer in the development and sale of software used to increase life scientists’ productivity using their desktop computer or on the Amazon Cloud. DNASTAR Lasergene supports molecular biologists, geneticists, and structural biologists in meeting virtually all of their DNA, RNA, and protein sequence needs, including Sanger and next-generation sequence assembly and analysis, protein sequence and structure analysis, protein structure prediction, antibody modeling, and protein-protein docking with easy-to-use, affordable, flexible computer software.

Contact
Anne Stover
Senior Digital Marketing Manager
DNASTAR, Inc.
Telephone: 608-237-3086
U.S. Toll Free: 866-511-5090
stovera@dnastar.com