• Final Four Weeks for 2011 Best Practices Awards Entries

    Dec 20, 2010, 09:45 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | It’s down to the final four weeks for entries in the 2011 Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards.   
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  • SNAP Comes Up Trumps at Inaugural CAGI Competition

    Dec 17, 2010, 13:40 PM by Michael Croft
    Nature.com | Rutgers University bioinformatician Yana Bromberg's SNAP program won top honors at the inaugural Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation (CAGI) competition, convened last week by University of California Berkeley's Steven Brenner.
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  • 23andMe Scores NIH Funding for Pharmacogenetics Research

    Dec 17, 2010, 08:00 AM by Michael Croft
    Fast Company | Consumer genomics company 23andMe has received a $190,000 grant to study "web-based phenotyping for genome-wide association studies of drug response" from the NIH.
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  • Meet the Genome Bloggers

    Dec 16, 2010, 00:05 AM by Michael Croft

    Nature News | Set your genome free on the internet, and it might come back to you with some surprising interpretations. Projects such as the Dodecad Ancestry Project and the Eurogenes Ancestry Project are analyzing personal ancestry and human population history and reporting the findings online.

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  • HHMI Launches International Early Career Scientist Competition

    Dec 15, 2010, 03:05 AM by Michael Croft

    HHMI | The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has launched an international competition to select up to 35 early career scientists working at academic institutions in 18 countries on five continents with the goal of helping these talented individuals establish independent research programs.

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  • Ion Torrent’s $3-Million Community Incentive Plan

    Dec 14, 2010, 10:10 AM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | Ion Torrent, the next-generation sequencing company founded by Jonathan Rothberg that was recently acquired by Life Technologies, is offering three $1-million prizes to any researcher(s) or programmer(s) that come up with major enhancements in the speed, quantity and accuracy of the company’s newly released Personal Genome Machine (PGM).  
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  • Deadly Trials

    Dec 13, 2010, 00:05 AM by Michael Croft

    Vanity Fair | As more clinical trials move overseas, are the results of those trials applicable to Americans? Are they safe? Vanity Fair argues that overseas trials are beyond the reach of FDA and are conducted where "regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves."

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  • Panasonic, imec Announce Lab-on-Chip for SNP Detection

    Dec 10, 2010, 06:25 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | Panasonic and imec have announced components of a lab-on-a-chip sensor enabling SNP detection. The technology was presented this week at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco and included  various a miniaturized pump for on-chip generation of high pressures, a micropillar filter optimized for DNA separation achieving world-record resolution, and a SNP detector allowing on-chip detection using very small sample volumes.

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  • Break Out: Pacific Biosciences Team Identifies Asian Origin for Haitian Cholera Bug

    Dec 9, 2010, 16:05 PM by Michael Croft
    Bio-IT World | In a dramatic piece of genetic detective work, Pacific Biosciences and Harvard Medical School researchers have decoded the sequence of the strain of bacteria responsible for the deadly cholera outbreak in Haiti. The findings, which confirm the putative Asian origin for the devastating outbreak, are published online in the New England Journal of Medicine today. 
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  • Complete Genomics Adds CNV Analysis to Cancer Sequencing

    Dec 9, 2010, 04:45 AM by Michael Croft

    Xconomy | Complete Genomics is amping up its efforts to sequence cancer genomes. As an addition to its $10,000 sequencing service, the company plans to run basic computational analysis for all the copy number variations, and structural variations in tumors at no extra cost.

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  • Broad Updates Molecular Signatures Database

    Dec 7, 2010, 05:10 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | Researchers at the Broad Institute have released MSigDB 3.0, the most comprehensive molecular signatures database to date. MSigDB is a database of annotated gene sets that has become a standard tool for gaining insights from the results of genomic studies.

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  • Pfizer CEO Kindler Retires

    Dec 6, 2010, 00:00 AM by Michael Croft

    Reuters | Pfizer CEO, Jeffrey Kindler, retired unexpectedly the company announced late on Sunday. He is being replaced by the gobal head of pharmaceuticals, Ian Read.

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  • Nanopore Sequencing Takes More Small Steps

    Dec 3, 2010, 00:25 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | New research from Mark Akeson and colleagues at UCSC shows that the decade long goal of sequencing DNA by passing an intact single strand of DNA through a protein nanopore is edging closer to reality. 

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  • Phylogenetics for Facebook?

    Dec 2, 2010, 01:55 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | A pattern-matching puzzle created by bioinformaticians at McGill University lets players sort genetic code. The game, called Phylo, takes advantage of the human brain's efficiency at recognizing and sorting patterns to tackle multiple sequence alignments.

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  • Survey Says Drug Makers Still Frustrated

    Dec 1, 2010, 02:40 AM by Michael Croft

    San Diego Union Tribune | Life science companies are irked by the FDA's lengthy drug review process, increasing fees, and issues raised late in the process according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey released yesterday.

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  • LIMS Made Freely Available to DNA Barcoding Community

    Nov 30, 2010, 04:55 AM by Michael Croft

    Bio-IT World | SINGAPORE—The Moorea Biocode Project, a species inventory of the island of Moorea, is making publicly available its LIMS as a free beta version. The Moorea Biocode Project aims to create a comprehensive inventory of all of the coral reef and terrestrial species on Moorea larger than a microbe. The Biocode LIMS and data analysis components of the project were developed by Biomatters in collaboration with the Biocode Project researchers as a plugin for Biomatters’ Geneious Pro sequence analysis software.

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  • Chasing Exascale

    Nov 29, 2010, 02:35 AM by Michael Croft

    PC World | There's an international race to build an exascale computer--a project that is estimated to cost billions of dollars. At the Department of Energy, Peter Beckman is leading the effort.

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  • Melanoma Methods of Resistance

    Nov 25, 2010, 01:40 AM by Michael Croft

    Nature News | Two studies published in Nature reveal why promising melanoma drug PLX4032 fails in some patients and how tumors' resistance to the drug may be overcome.

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  • Microsoft Cofounder Invests $9.4 Million in Biotech, Neuroscience

    Nov 23, 2010, 03:50 AM by Michael Croft

    Boston Globe | Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, is funding biotech with $9.4 million in grants. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation has awarded seven three-year grants to Allen Distinguished Investigators, in what could become an ongoing program. The grants are focused on biotech and basic neuroscience and are meant for cutting-edge research projects.

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  • IBM Takes Top Green Honors at SC2010

    Nov 22, 2010, 02:35 AM by Michael Croft

    PC World | China may have taken top honors in the most recent Top500 listing, but IBM walked away with another award: the world's most energy-efficient supercomputer.

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