Bio-IT World | Thomson Reuters announced a series of APIs (application programming interfaces) for its Cortellis life sciences platform this morning called Cortellis for Informatics. The APIs will give customers direct access to the Cortellis content.  

Bio-IT World | Bioinformatics.org has announced the finalists in the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Award: Helen Berman, Rutgers University; Carole Goble, University of Manchester; Eugene V. Koonin, NCBI/NLM/NIH; Heng Li, Broad Institute; John Quackenbush, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute & Harvard School of Public Health; Bruno Sobral, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute; and Janet Thornton, European Bioinformatics Institute. 

Bio-IT World | MicroRNAs (miRNAs) work by modifying gene expression at the post-translational level across a range of species, from plants to worms to humans, and Stephen Cohen's lab at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) in Singapore uses the fruit fly as a genetic model for the study of cancer, metabolic disease and neurodegeneration and in recent years has focused on understanding the biological functions of miRNAs in this context.  

Businessweek | Yesterday, Roche extended its offering for Illumina until March 23 after failing to win over shareholders with the $44.50/share offer that expired on February 24. Roche has been making offers for the biotech since January 25.

Bio-IT World | New products for February including Life Technologies' new Ion Proton sequence, new NGS analysis software from Integromics, new products for clinical trial randomization and patient enrollment tracking, and new product lines specifically for patient-specific molecular and genomic data.