Feb 26, 2013, 14:00 PM by Michael Croft

Bloomberg | The Faroe Islands' 50,000 inhabitants are offering up their DNA for research. The plan is for every citizen to be sequenced, and to use the data for medical research.

Feb 26, 2013, 14:00 PM by Michael Croft

New York Times | 60 years ago this week, James Watson pieced together the final pieces of a model of DNA and, together with his colleague Francis Crick, constructed the iconic double helix model. The classic paper by Crick and Watson wasn’t published in Nature for a further two months, but three weeks after the model was made, Crick relayed the discovery and its significance in a remarkable letter to his 12-year-old son Michael. “My dear Michael, Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery,” begins the letter.

Feb 25, 2013, 13:00 PM by Michael Croft

In the Pipeline | The ENCODE project has received a thorough dressing down in a new Genome Biology and Evolution paper by Dan Graur and colleagues. The authors highlight six major errors in the ENCODE project that led to "absurd conclusion[s]". Derek Lowe breaks down the claims (accusations?) on his blog.

Feb 25, 2013, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Thanks to a $1.9 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, PatientsLikeMe will lead development of truly “patient-centered” health outcome measures via the world’s first open-participation research platform. Never before have crowdsourcing approaches to authoring, reviewing, and validating outcome measures been attempted on a single system, says Jamie Heywood, co-founder and chairman of the nearly 200,000-member patient network.

Feb 25, 2013, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | The 2013 Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference—likened by one participant as “the bastard child of a Gordon Conference and a Las Vegas Porn Convention"—may have lacked the show-stopping presentation of an Oxford Nanopore this year, but there was plenty to admire on the new technology front.

Feb 22, 2013, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft

Reddit | Yesterday Eric Lander, President and Founding Director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, spent a couple of hours on Reddit doing an AMA open Q&A session. Questions ranged from the ridiulous to the profound, but Lander was a good sport. He weighed in on what to do to increase the attractiveness of PhD programs; the current most important scientific questions; the coolest discoveries in the 21st century; immortality; his mustache; genetics in 10-20 years; and more.

Feb 22, 2013, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | A reproductive clinic in New Jersey has successfully used next-generation sequencing (NGS) to screen embryos conceived in otherwise routine in vitro fertilization (IVF) cases prior to implantation. The news was reported in a talk yesterday evening at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference by Dagan Wells, a geneticist at the University of Oxford.

Feb 21, 2013, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Following a flagship collaboration with Foundation Medicine to provide interpretative software for genome analysis in cancer patients, N-of-One has announced a new partnership with the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

Feb 20, 2013, 14:00 PM by Michael Croft

New York Times | Yuri Milner, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, and Mark Zuckerberg have announced the winners of the first Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Eleven scientists were awarded $3 million each for their work.

Feb 20, 2013, 10:00 AM by Michael Croft

eWeek |  In a media event yesterday, NetApp unveiled its first all-solid-state array, a new flash accelerator for servers, and a future new storage line coming out in 2014.

Feb 20, 2013, 09:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Seventeen million babies are born each year in China. Yet in 2010, the country only had the capacity to offer 150,000 amniocenteses a year. As the most populous country in the world with a well-established one child policy, that number is astonishingly low. And it represents a ripe market for the next generation of prenatal testing. Now Berry Genomics, co-founded by Daixing Zhou, is hoping to capitalize on the market in China.

Feb 19, 2013, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft

Technology Review | Coriell Life Sciences--a startup from a partnership between Coriell Institute for Medical Research and IBM--aims to facilitate genomics in the clinic. The company plans to offer sequencing, data storage in a "gene vault", and data delivery in an electronic medical record.

Feb 19, 2013, 07:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Sage Bionetworks and the DREAM Project— Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods—are merging efforts to run open science computational challenges which foster the broader collaboration of the research community and provide a meaningful impact to both discovery and clinical research.

Feb 18, 2013, 11:00 AM by Michael Croft

Xconomy | After layoffs in the 150,000 range from 2009-2012, pharma and biotech are lamenting their lack of qualified workers to grow their businesses.

Feb 18, 2013, 08:50 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Sales of the Ion Torrent desktop sequencers exceed those of its rival MiSeq machine from Illumina, according to a new report from Macquarie Equities Research, which highlights encouraging trends for both Illumina and Ion Torrent parent company, Life Technologies.

Feb 15, 2013, 13:00 PM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World Roundup | This week, PeerJ published its first articles--on sauropod necks, the cups and balls trick, anti-apoptotic signaling in mammalian hibernation and more. The scientific publishing site is more than just an open access publisher. PeerJ has built an innovative platform from scratch.

Feb 15, 2013, 12:00 PM by Michael Croft

Computerworld | Amazon Web Services has released its cloud-based data warehouse Redshift to all users. Redshift users can provison a single 2TB data warehouse or as a cluster of 16 2TB nodes or 16TB nodes, by default.

Feb 15, 2013, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft

Wired | Genomics is poised for a "cell phone moment," Wired says--the tipping point where the technology becomes a commodity, hardware is cheap, and software and apps drives the industry.

Feb 14, 2013, 17:30 PM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | sbv IMPROVER announced its next challenge today at the Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference in San Francisco. The Species Translation Challenge is an open scientific challenge that will use crowdsourcing to help define the limits of rodent models as predictors of human biology. The challenge will launch later in 2013.

Feb 13, 2013, 10:00 AM by Michael Croft

Bio-IT World | Cancer Commons has announced six new cancer ecosystem Alliance members: Knight Diagnostic Laboratories at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU); the Thoracic Oncology Program, University of Chicago Medicine; Science Exchange, an online marketplace for scientific services; and patient advocates the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, Imerman Angels, and Melanoma Research Foundation.