DNASTAR


DNASTAR is a global bioinformatics software company incorporated in 1984 that is headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin. DNASTAR develops and sells software for sequence analysis in the fields of genomics, molecular biology, and structural biology.

Software

DNASTAR software first gained popularity in the 1980s and 1990s for its sequence assembly and analysis capabilities of Sanger sequencing data. Lasergene 15.2 was released in June 2018. DNASTAR software is available for desktop computers running Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux as well as for use on Amazon Web Services.
In 2007, DNASTAR expanded their offerings to include software for next-generation sequencing and structural biology. DNASTAR's next-gen software supports data from Illumina, Ion Torrent, and Pacific Biosciences and allows the user to assemble, align, analyze and visualize genomic data. Lasergene's use in next-generation sequence assembly and analysis was contributed as a chapter, written by company scientists, to the 2008 book Next Generation Genome Sequencing edited by Michael Janitz.
DNASTAR software is utilized by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, academic, and clinical researchers in more than 90 countries.

Reviews

Writing in The Scientist, David R. Smith gave positive reviews to several bioinformatics software packages including DNAstar, but said that his bioinformatics skills plateaued and the licensing and upgrading costs were a significant proportion of his lab's operating budget.

Accolades

In 2007, DNASTAR was awarded a Reader's Choice Gold Award by Scientific Computing Magazine for the Lasergene sequence analysis software.
The 2008 book Inventing Entrepreneurs: Technology Innovators and their Entrepreneurial Journey by Gerard George and Adam J. Bock includes DNASTAR as an example of an innovative and entrepreneurial success story.
A research study by BMC Genomics in 2010 determined that SeqMan assemblies performed best, with more novel sequences and better recapitulation of transcripts.
Another BMC Genomics study in 2011 determined that the best overall contig performance resulted from a SeqMan NGen assembly.

Customers