25 April 2012 - Illumina Inc (NASDAQ:ILMN) on Wednesday said it has introduced BaseSpace Apps, a dedicated applications store for BaseSpace, its genomics cloud computing platform.

Informatics solutions available through BaseSpace Apps has been designed to allow customers to connect with an expanding community of academic, commercial and open source tool providers who are building applications around Illumina data to simplify and accelerate genomic data analysis.

Included in BaseSpace Apps will be a publicly available API (application programming interface) which allows developers to create and deploy new applications for the analysis of genetic data generated on Illumina systems.

The company also said that it has introduced its iSAAC genome alignment tool. Historically, alignment is said to have been the most time consuming and processor-intensive step in genome analysis. Available on BaseSpace as well as standard workstations, iSAAC maps sequencing is intended to read to their proper location up to 10 times faster than existing aligners, expediting and simplifying a component in data analysis.

Illumina is a developer, manufacturer, and marketer of life science tools and integrated systems designed for the analysis of genetic variation and function.