Geneious

Bioinformatics, molecular biology, NGS analysis, sequence analysis, molecular cloning, plasmid viewing, chimera filtering – if all these words mean nothing to you, then perhaps Geneious isn’t for you. You see, this cross-platform application is, as developer Biomatters puts it, "the world’s most cited sequence analysis software," a collection of bioinformatics tools for molecular biology and NGS analysis.

Geneious is cross-platform software, available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Please note that Geneious is based on Java and comes bundled with the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). To get started with Geneious on a Windows PC, you will have to perform two tasks: install the application (a setup wizard will guide you through all the steps) and request a 14-day trial (you can do that here).

On first launch, Geneious will invite you to check out a tutorial. I bring this up because, among plenty of other things, the tutorial presents the main components of the Geneious interface: a toolbar at the top, the Sources panel on the left, the Document table in the upper right hand side, and the Document viewer in the lower right hand side.

Geneious' list of features includes the following: comprehensive analysis of data including genome browser, contig visualization, SNP calling and RNA-Seq expression analysis; trim, assemble and view Sanger sequencing trace files; automatic annotation for gene prediction; view and edit DNA alignments with real-time translation and highlighting; view plasmid maps; design primers; and more.

As mentioned above, Geneious is free to use for a 14-day trial period. You can keep using Geneious once the trial period expires, but it will work in a feature-limited mode.

With its generous collection of tools, Geneious aims to cover all your bioinformatics needs. Go get this cross-platform tool and put the developer’s boas to the test. See if it really is "a powerful and comprehensive suite of molecular biology and
NGS analysis tools."