Ocimum Bio launches new product

Ocimum Biosolutions launched on Thursday a new product, iRNAWiz "" a comprehensive and intuitive tool for the design of short interfering RNA.

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a single-stranded nucleic acid made up of nucleotides which are the subunits of a DNA molecule. RNA is involved in the transcription of genetic information. RNA interference (iRNA) is one of the most powerful molecular biology tools with a wide variety of applications.

It is the phenomenon in which introduction of a double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) suppresses the expression of the homologous gene. RNA interference (RNAi) is an evolutionarily conserved mechanism in plant and animal cells that directs the degradation of messenger RNAs homologous to short double-stranded RNAs termed small interfering RNA (siRNA).

The success of a RNA interference experiment is heavily dependent on the design of siRNA for specificity and efficiency. siRNAs must be designed against a target region. The regions of interest may be set by eliminating or selecting sequences that define open reading frames (ORFs), untranslated regions (UTRs), motifs/ domains, and introns and exons or Open Reading Frames (ORFs).

Anuradha Acharya, chief executive of Ocimum Biosolutions, stated in a release that iRNAWiz provides a comprehensive and intuitive design environment for the organisation of sequence data and design of siRNAs, and tracking and analysis of successful templates. It provides the user with flexibility to define his own search templates, set regions of interest based of wide variety of criterion like ORFs, UTR regions, introns and exons, secondary structures, motifs and domains, and post design analysis of successful siRNA.

"We are very excited at the release of our niche product iRNAWiz. We believe that scientists will be able to significantly speed up their research in the field of siRNA design. iRNAWiz represents a major step forward in this field of science," Acharya said. Ocimum plans to launch PharmatrackerTM, a LIMS for the pharmaceutical industry, by the end of the year.

Biosolutions, an ISO 9001:2000 certified life sciences contract R&D company, provides customised contract research services and next generation bioinformatics tools and services in the area of genomics, proteomics, laboratory information management (LIMS) for biotech and pharmaceutical industry. The company's other products include sequence analysis package GenchekTM; microarray data analysis suite GenowizTM; and, gene optimisation tool OptGeneTM.