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Final Four Weeks for 2011 Best Practices Awards Entries
Dec 20, 2010, 09:45 AM by Michael CroftBio-IT World | It’s down to the final four weeks for entries in the 2011 Bio-IT World Best Practices Awards.Full story -
SNAP Comes Up Trumps at Inaugural CAGI Competition
Dec 17, 2010, 13:40 PM by Michael CroftNature.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.Full story -
23andMe Scores NIH Funding for Pharmacogenetics Research
Dec 17, 2010, 08:00 AM by Michael CroftFast 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.Full story -
Meet the Genome Bloggers
Dec 16, 2010, 00:05 AM by Michael CroftFull storyNature 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 CroftFull storyHHMI | 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 CroftBio-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).Full story -
Deadly Trials
Dec 13, 2010, 00:05 AM by Michael CroftFull storyVanity 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 CroftFull storyBio-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 CroftBio-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.Full story -
Complete Genomics Adds CNV Analysis to Cancer Sequencing
Dec 9, 2010, 04:45 AM by Michael CroftFull storyXconomy | 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 CroftFull storyBio-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 CroftFull storyReuters | 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 CroftFull storyBio-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 CroftFull storyBio-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 CroftFull storySan 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 CroftFull storyBio-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 CroftFull storyPC 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 CroftFull storyNature 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 CroftFull storyBoston 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 CroftFull storyPC 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.