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DNASTAR was founded by University of Wisconsin Professor of Genetics Frederick Blattner and his student colleague John Schroeder in the early 1980s. DNASTAR was among the early pioneers in bioinformatics. As personal computing was coming on the scene, Fred and John saw an opportunity to provide turnkey solutions to geneticists and other molecular biologists when working with DNA and protein sequences. DNASTAR's mission then was the same as it is today: to provide life scientists with the tools they need to efficiently and effectively accomplish their research objectives. For a major portion of our history, we have done this through the development and sale of Lasergene, our premier suite of software tools for sequence assembly, editing, alignment and analysis. In the early years, the product was written for the CPM operating system. When the IBM personal computer appeared, a DOS version of our software soon followed. With the advent of Compact Discs, DNASTAR was the first to offer the GenBank database on CD; hence the name "Lasergene". Next came the Apple Macintosh® computers and the introduction of a Graphical User Interface for DNASTAR's product line. A few years later the Microsoft Windows® version of our product was released and, for more than 10 years, Lasergene has remained the only comprehensive sequence analysis software package available on both the Macintosh® and Windows® operating systems. With our latest versions of Lasergene providing users the ability to work with both Sanger and 454Ô Next Generation sequencing technologies, the Company has established itself as the pioneer software company in the Next Generation sequencing market. Since 2000, we have expanded our product offering to include GenVision, a powerful data visualization tool. In 2005, we introduced our first microarray gene expression product, ArrayStar. In June of 2007 a new version of ArrayStar was released that significantly increases the gene expression analysis Features available to users.