DNASTAR Releases Lasergene 17.3 Software

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 ...