Illumina Inc. scientists have completed sequencing the genomes of an anonymous African Trio (Yoruba from Ibadan, Nigeria) using the company's Genome Analyzer sequencing platform. Illumina previously announced the sequencing of the first of these HapMap samples, that of the adult male, in February 2008. The company initiated sequencing of the two additional samples in April and generated an average of 14 fold coverage of each genome within weeks. Illumina scientists were able to rapidly generate the data by incorporating system improvements in the Genome Analyzer that yielded single flowcell runs exceeding 7.5 billion bases (GB) of high-quality data. Read the press release.
ExonHit Therapeutics S.A. announced the availability of its new SpliceArray for use in disease modeling and toxicogenomic applications by the basic and pre-clinical research communities. These SpliceArray products provide high-resolution expression profiling analysis for the rat genome and detect all known and novel expressed transcripts, according to the company. The Rat SpliceArray monitors over 23,000 genes utilizing over 200,000 exon body and 180,000 splice junction regions. This comprehensive coverage enables investigators to further elucidate the enormous diversity of the rat transcriptome. Read the press release.
Invitrogen Corp. and BioServe announced that their technologies identified noncoding RNAs that were differentially expressed in healthy and diseased tissue. These micro ribonucleic acid (miRNA) sequences were either up or down-regulated between matched samples of RNA isolated from healthy colon and colorectal cancer tissues. Data was presented in a poster at the annual meeting for the American Association for Cancer Research. Invitrogen researchers used RNA samples from BioServe's OncoRNA product line, a series of RNAs isolated from fresh-frozen, fully annotated tumor and adjacent normal tissues, to probe the Ncode Human miRNA microarray V3. Ncode Profiler software identified miRNAs that were either up- or down-regulated in tumor versus healthy tissue, and researchers used quantitative PCR to validate the findings. Read the press release.
Genedata has released Genedata Expressionist version 5.0, its enterprise high-throughput biomarker discovery platform. Supporting a wide array of ‘omics technologies, Genedata Expressionist 5.0 easily handles the ever-increasing throughput, size and complexity of datasets to perform truly integrated analysis. The new release provides significantly enhanced data processing and management features for quantitative and qualitative biomarker development. Read the press release. The company also announced that the long standing collaboration between Genedata and the University of Freiburg is being taken to the next level with the latest development at the Freiburg Initiative for Systems Biology (FRISYS). Read the press release.
SimBioSys announced it has exploited parallel computer architecture to dramatically speed up the process of virtual screening and docking. This advance positively impacts the speed by which scientists can perform virtual screening calculations. Through porting and optimization of SimBioSys' eHiTS software on the IBM BladeCenter QS21 based on the multi-core Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor, the new "eHiTS Lightning" software application has demonstrated accelerated throughput of up to 30x faster than the application running on a traditional processor configuration. With this improvement in performance, the company says, much larger libraries of chemical compounds can be screened in a comparable time, or alternatively, the algorithms can be applied to generate results with higher accuracy in a more manageable timeframe than previously available. Read the press release.