Sequencing and Analysis of the Hydra Genome
Chapman, Kirkness et al., Nature
An international research collaboration reports their sequencing and analysis of the Hydra magnipapillata genome, and compare it to the genomes of several other organisms. "The Hydra genome has been shaped by bursts of transposable element expansion, horizontal gene transfer, trans-splicing, and simplification of gene structure and gene content that parallel simplification of the Hydra life cycle," the authors write. They team suggests that comparisons of the Hydra genome to the reported sequences of other animals have helped them to elucidate the evolution of several of the organism's characteristics.
TAIR Eyes Corporate Sponsorship Program as Other Model-Organism Databases Focus on Sustainability
While the Arabidopsis Information Resource is facing funding challenges, other major model organism databases appear to be on solid financial footing for now.
Cycle Computing Aims to Make Cloud-Based Life Science Computing 'Just Like Using Gmail'
"The life science market seems to be adopting the cloud at a much faster rate than other industries, and I think part of that is due to the fact that large pharma in particular is comfortable with outsourcing everything they do that is not part of their core business," said Cycle Computing's CEO.
Q&A: Indra Neil Sarkar Sees Many Roles for Biomedical Informaticians in Translational Medicine
Sarkar, who is director of biomedical informatics at the University of Vermont's Center for Clinical and Translational Science, said biomedical informaticians should be involved wherever translational barriers need to be surmounted.
Open Bioinformatics Foundation Selected as Mentor Organization for Google Summer of Code
Google has named OBF among 150 mentoring organizations for the 2010 Google Summer of Code — a student internship program for open-source projects.
Entest Turns to Bioinformatics to Discover Therapeutics, Biomarkers for Lung Disease
The firm's bioinformatics-based approach will integrate existing and new data, including -omics information about chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
CLC Bio assembler, EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database, Accelrys Discovery Studio 2.5.5, Reactome Knowledgebase, RefSeq 40
Russ Altman, Alex Bateman, Don Gilbert, David Lipman, John Quackenbush, G.P.S. Raghava
W3C Group Plans Ontology for Translational Medicine to Help Bridge Drug Discovery Phases
The World Wide Web Consortium's Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group is plotting a semantic course to help find ways for pharma to communicate across drug discovery and development phases.
BioDiscovery Turns to the Cloud to Support Collaborative Copy Number Variation Database
The resource, which is integrated with the firm's copy number variation software, is built on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and is intended to help small and medium-sized labs with limited infrastructure budgets.
Eureka Genomics has a two-pronged business model that involves sequencing services and internal discovery projects to identify novel disease-associated microorganisms. Underlying this hybrid model is a portfolio of proprietary bioinformatics tools that the company licensed in 2006 from the University of Houston.
Wash U to Use $14M ARRA Grant to Double Size, Capacity of Genomics Data Center
Wash U's current genomic data center, a 16,000-square-foot facility that houses approximately 5,000 processors and more than 5 petabytes of disk storage, is nearly 90 percent full.
