Royal Society of Chemistry Buys ChemSpider as Open Access Chem Resources Gain Momentum

May 15, 2009

By Vivien Marx

The news of the ChemSpider buyout by the RSC is "great news, not only for ChemSpider but the chemistry community in general," Rajarshi Guha, co-founder of the open source cheminformatics group Blue Obelisk, told BioInform this week.

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In this issue of BioInform

Young Investigator Profile

Christopher Maher

University of Michigan Medical School
Research Investigator

Gene Fusions and Transcriptome Sequencing

Christopher Maher is focused on elucidating gene fusions, which he first became acquainted with during his potdoctoral work at the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology. Maher hopes to continue discovering novel gene fusions as well as draw new findings out of already-known gene fusions. Last year, he published a paper in Nature in January of 2009 entitled "Transcriptome sequencing to detect gene fusions in cancer," which he says provides a validation for the approach of using next-gen sequencing to find gene fusions in cancer. This was followed up by a PNAS paper in July which demonstrated the gene fusion concept using paired-end transcriptome sequencing.
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Papers of Note

PTB Proteins Induce RNA Looping
Lamichhane, Daubner et al., PNAS
Researchers in the US and Switzerland report that polypyrimidine tract-binding proteins induce RNA looping ― a finding they deduced using FRET, NMR spectroscopy, and in vivo splicing data. They show that two PTB RNA recognition motifs can bind two distant pyrimidine tracts, bringing their 5' and 3' ends in close proximity, thus inducing loop formation.

Aβ as an Antimicrobial Peptide
Soscia, Kirby et al., PLoS ONE
A team of researchers describe the amyloid β-protein as capable of functioning as an antimicrobial peptide in vitro. Their examinations indicate that Aβ, thought to be a key mediator of Alzheimer's disease pathology, demonstrates antimicrobial activity against eight common microorganisms, and may perform this function in the innate immune system ― a finding that contrasts with the current perception of Aβ-mediated pathology.
People on the Move

Adrian Dillon will resign from his job as executive VP of finance and administration and CFO of Agilent Technologies to become chief financial and administrative officer at Skype. He will be replaced at the beginning of April by Didier Hirsch, who currently is VP of corporate controllership and taxes and who will serve as acting CFO.

Pacific Biosciences last week appointed Susan Barnes as its first chief financial officer.

She formerly was senior VP of finance and CFO of Intuitive Surgical and previously served as managing director of the private equity group at Jeffries & Company, among other positions.

Joel McComb is leaving his post as senior VP and GM of Illumina's Life Sciences business to become COO at Synthetic Genomics. McComb will depart Illumina and take on the new position at SGI, where he will report to founder and CEO J. Craig Venter, effective March 1.
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Royal Society of Chemistry Buys ChemSpider as Open Access Chem Resources Gain Momentum

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In this issue of BioInform

Young Investigator Profile

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People on the Move

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Funding

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