Strand Life Sciences


Strand Life Sciences, formerly Strand Genomics, is a Bengaluru, India-based in silico technology company. Strand focuses in data mining, predictive modeling, computational chemistry, software engineering, bioinformatics, and research biology to develop software and services for life sciences research. Strand also offers custom solutions based on its intellectual property. In August 2007, Strand and Agilent Technologies, Inc. entered an agreement in which Strand develops and supports Agilent's GeneSpring software which Agilent obtained through Silicon Genetics acquisition in August 2004. In October 2010, Strand and Agilent renewed the agreement for Strand to expand the scope of Agilent's GeneSpring across multiple life sciences disciplines.

History

Strand Life Sciences was founded in October 2000 by Professors Vijay Chandru, Ramesh Hariharan, Swami Manohar, and V. Vinay. It was registered as Strand Genomics, but was later renamed to Strand Life Sciences as it dealt with various other aspects of life sciences. In August 2007, Strand and Agilent Technologies, Inc. entered an agreement in which Strand develops and supports Agilent's GeneSpring software which Agilent obtained through Silicon Genetics acquisition in August 2004. In October 2010, Strand and Agilent renewed the agreement for Strand to expand the scope of Agilent's GeneSpring across multiple life sciences disciplines.

Software

Strand NGS (formerly Avadis NGS)

is a software platform for next-generation sequencing data analysis. It can import raw read sequences from sequencing platforms like Illumina, Ion Torrent, PacBio, ABI, and 454 Life Sciences and supports fragment, single-end, paired-end, mate-paired, directional single/ paired end library types. Raw reads in formats FASTA, FASTQ, SAM, BAM, Unaligned BAM, BED, Counts data, VCF, VAL, or Eland formats can be imported into the tool. In addition, perform split read alignment for detecting long InDels and translocations.
Strand NGS also allows users to perform quality control on the imported data and filter reads before the main analysis is performed. Version 2.6 of the tool supports six experiment types: ChIP-Seq, RNA-Seq, small RNA, Methyl-Seq, MeDIP-Seq and DNA-Seq. Gene, transcript, SNP, homology, gene ontology, and other annotations needed for analysis can be downloaded directly from within Strand NGS .
Visualization tools, namely Genome Browser, Gene View, and Variant Support View, are a key aspect of the software. Other visualizations available with tool are scatter plot, MvA plot, profile plot, histogram, heat map, box and whisker plot, and Venn diagram. Aided with visualizations, users a pictorial feel for statistical trends in the data.
Strand NGS also provides access to organism-specific interaction databases containing relations between proteins, small molecules, enzymes, complexes, biological processes, molecular functions, and gene families. The two million interactions present in these databases can also be augmented by importing pathways in GPML format, XML format, BioPAX format from Reactome, Cancer Cell Map, etc. Gene lists generated by analysis steps can be used as the starting point for many pathway analysis operations.

GeneSpring

GeneSpring GX, GeneSpring Workgroup, and Mass Profiler Pro are developed by Strand's R&D division in Bangalore.

Avadis

Avadis is a comprehensive data mining and visualization platform. It combines the power of scalable algorithms and dynamic interactive visualization. The platform was customized for various scientific domains like gene expression, next-generation sequencing, pre-clinical research, chemistry and healthcare.

Sarchitect

Sarchitect is a platform for modeling and predicting drug-relevant properties of molecules in silico.

ArrayAssist

ArrayAssist was developed for Stratagene, Inc., based on the Avadis platform. The production was stopped after Stratagene was acquired by Agilent Technologies, Inc. in 2007.

Accolades