The developers at Golden Helix have raised the bar again with the release of GenomeBrowe 2.0. About a year and a half after the initial release, Golden Helix has expanded the functionality of GenomeBrowse to fulfill feature requests from both fundamental research investigators and translational scientists who require a visualization tool to gain key insight into their results.

The Golden Helix GenomeBrowse® tool features impeccable genomic data visualization, giving researchers the power to navigate their sequence data in a fluid and dynamic way. Pairing a high performance backend with a streamlined user interface has given way to a discovery process that is this year’s must have. And yes, GenomeBrowse 2.0 is still free!

Version Two is packed with new features, one of them being the ability to add custom genome reference sequences through our Data Conversion Wizard. This wizard allows researchers to upload a custom reference sequence to the program without having to ask for it to be created by Golden Helix. This was one of the most requested features on the GenomeBrowse community site.

The other feature most often seen on the community site was support for BED and WIG files. We are happy to say that these are now supported in GenomeBrowse as well as:

The Convert Wizard has made GenomeBrowse 2.0 to be more flexible than ever before.

While not ever technically “requested,” we are super-excited about the brand-new, native, first-class integration of Evernote that has been included in GenomeBrowse 2.0. The ability to easily bookmark regions and save screenshots to your Evernote notebook extends the GenomeBrowse platform to a new level of organization and collaboration. Each note can contain multiple tags for searching after the fact, increasing the organization of the project. Getting feedback on research has also been made easier with Evernote, which allows you to publish notes in HTML to share with colleagues and collaborators. To learn more about the Evernote integration, view Andrew’s blog post.

The ability to access sample files over a network (FTP or HTTP) or the cloud is now available. Golden Helix has always offered a large annotation library that is available on demand from our servers, but in GenomeBrowse Version 1, samples had to be local. Not anymore. For researchers whose data is stored on a lab network or the cloud, this feature will save many, many hours waiting for samples to download in order to view them.

The long awaited remote control is now also included in GenomeBrowse 2.0. This built in feature allows researchers to control GenomeBrowse programmatically via HTTP remote access to integrate GenomeBrowse visualization into already existing workflows.

The latest version of GenomeBrowse also comes with a manual even though the product has an extremely intuitive design. The manual covers how the platform functions as well as tips and tricks for the advanced user.

If you have a previous version of GenomeBrowse or don’t have it at all, GenomeBrowse 2.0 is a must have. Some say it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Download it for free here

And make sure to let us know what you think!!