The MathWorks releases Bioinformatics Toolbox for MATLAB

The MathWorks today announced the availability of its new Bioinformatics Toolbox for MATLAB. The product facilitates the analysis of complex bioinformatics data, from genomic sequences to microarray data analysis, and speeds up the development and deployment of algorithms. Bioinformaticists can now rely on a proven data analysis and algorithm development environment that enables them to respond to data analysis requests efficiently and quickly with less hand coding.

"MATLAB provides an abundance of toolboxes that are critical to modelling and algorithm design. The Bioinformatics Toolbox forms a natural addition to MATLAB by providing a seamless interface for accessing essential public-domain genome data repositories, and supplying the necessary building-blocks for genomic data processing," said Bahram Ghaffarzadeh Kermani, PhD, a staff bioinformatics scientist at Illumina, Inc in San Diego.

The Bioinformatics Toolbox is designed to help users understand and visualise large amounts of research data in a fraction of the time associated with traditional biotech applications. With this latest addition to its product family, The MathWorks is delivering the power and versatility of its integrated technical computing environment directly to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

Leveraging off the rich programming functionality of MATLAB, the Bioinformatics Toolbox provides scientists and bioinformaticists with an open, extensible environment for algorithm development and manipulation and enables easy communication of applications across research departments. As a result, bioinformaticists can use the toolbox to focus efforts on the core of their work - research and analysis - without the risks associated with using disparate software programs.

Among its numerous features and capabilities, the Bioinformatics Toolbox provides access to standard genomic file formats, Web-based databases such as GenBank and PIR, and online data sources. The toolbox also offers specialised routines for visualising microarray data, including box plots, I-R plots and spatial heat maps. Additional key features of The MathWorks Bioinformatics Toolbox include:

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* Genomic, proteomic, and gene expression file format;
* Genomic and proteomic sequence statistics, conversion and alignment;
* Protein feature analysis; and,
* Dotplot, clustergram and other genomic and proteomic data visualisations.

"Bioinformaticists have traditionally had to invest a great deal of time programming math and statistics algorithms in a short time frame," said Kristen Amuzzini, biotech, pharmaceutical and medical industry marketing manager, The MathWorks. "The combination of today`s MATLAB products and the new Bioinformatics Toolbox delivers the tools they need to analyse large data sets, and as a result, identify potential drug targets quickly and efficiently."