App: BioIllustrator
Developer: Valeriy Tarasov
Genres: Education, Medical

This app is aimed at scientists, students and amateurs interested in the creation of illustrations for scientific articles, PhD and diploma theses or presentations on various topics of biology.  

The drag-and-drop function of curated templates saves time on creating professional scientific illustrations - no more tedious work creating graphical elements ! The app also provides standard tools for the manipulation of images, texts, geometrical shapes and lines. User can also create a DNA plasmid map using the genbank (.gb, .gbk), SnapGene (.dna) or Serial Cloner (.xdna) file. 

The current version of the app contains templates for the following fields of biology: molecular biology, cell biology, microbiology, botany.  Each field is divided to subfields that facilitate the search for specific templates. There are templates of laboratory equipment useful for workflow illustrations. New templates and biological fields will be added regularly with updates of the app.  

Besides the default templates, users can request particular templates free of charge at the app support website. New templates will be included in the following app update.

BioIllustrator templates can be inserted as an image into any image editor or other presentation app. Users can also import custom images (JPG, PDF, PNG, TIFF) or text into the BioIllustrator canvas.     

Illustrations can be saved to the custom file format (.bil extension) for later  editing or can be exported to PDF, PNG, JPG or TIFF files for publication. 

In addition to the templates, the app contains links to open source scientific articles (reviews) selected for each biological filed/subfield. This can assist in the creation of scientifically grounded illustrations as well as in the writing of reports or theses on the corresponding topics.

Release notes:
* User can create a DNA plasmid map using the genbank (.gb, .gbk), SnapGene (.dna) or Serial Cloner (.xdna) file. 
* New templates are added.