Bio-IT World | 2017 Best Practices Awards | The Earlham Institute are working with Optalysys to apply Optalysys’ optical computing system to life science applications. The first release of the computing system is scheduled for early 2018, which both organizations say will be capable of performing a number of different DNA-based local sequence alignment applications.

Bio-IT World | WuXi NextCODE today announced the appointment of Rob Brainin as executive vice president and chief operating officer. Brainin joins the company from Illumina, where he was vice president and general manager of life sciences and applied genomics.

Bio-IT World Brief | IBM today announced the availability of new SAP-certified bare metal servers for SAP HANA platform deployments in the IBM Cloud and new configurations for VMware environments. The new cloud infrastructure-as-a-service solutions are designed to give enterprises the power and performance they need to manage their mission-critical applications running on SAP HANA.

Bio-IT World Contributed Commentary | The advent of single molecule, real-time sequencing, with average read lengths exceeding 12 kb, has allowed scientists to reliably detect structural variation for the first time. These latest studies have shown that previous human genome data sets have dramatically underrepresented the number of structural variants—along with their effect on health and disease.