People in the News
Sigma-Aldrich last week announced 2005 cash bonuses for its top officials. David Harvey, the company's chairman, receives $584,000; Michael Hogan, chief financial officer, receives $260,000; David Julien, president of research specialties, receives $188,000; Sigma President and CEO Jai Nagarkatti receives $341,000; and Franklin Wicks, president of Sigma-Aldrich Fine Chemicals, receives $194,000.
Jenny Graves was selected Asia-Pacific laureate of the L'oreal-Unesco 2006 awards for Women in Science, presented in Paris earlier this month.
Graves is the head of the comparative genomics research group at the Research School of Biological Sciences at the Australian National University. She is the director of the ARC Centre for Kangaroo Genomics at ANU and the University of Melbourne.
New Product Watch
Biosoft International this week launched AlleleID version 2.0, which the company said can enable the design of microarrays and qPCR diagnostic assays for rapid detection of pathogens or bacteria.
Biosoft said that AlleleID aligns the sequences and analyzes species-specific regions to design probes for microarrays and primers and probes for TaqMan or molecular beacon qPCR assays. For cross-species assays, Biosoft said that AlleleID identifies conserved regions of related organisms to help study gene expression when genome draft of the organism under study is not available.
The company recommended AlleleID v 2.0 for use in applications for environmental monitoring, in prevention and control of infectious diseases, development of surveillance tests and biodiversity studies.
Operon Biotechnologies this week announced the availability of OpArrays for the human, mouse, rat, and Arabidopsis thaliana genomes.
The arrays use probes from Operon's Array Ready Oligo Sets business, and the firm promised that the OpArray product line will expand to include microarrays for the more than 40 genomes that are currently offered through its AROS product line.
JMP, a SAS business, this week launched JMP Genetics, JMP Microarray, and JMP Proteomics, three software products for desktop statistical analysis of DNA, RNA, and protein data.
The company said the suite of products provides an integrated environment for accessing, sub-setting, analyzing, and exploring data patterns that can aid in drug development.
According to JMP, JMP Genetics provides methods for characterizing genetic variability and evaluating its association with biological phenotypes such as quantitative traits, chemical response, or small molecule expression. JMP Microarray offers a library of statistical capabilities for making transcript abundance discoveries, and JMP Proteomics facilitates the analysis of spectral data and the identification of biomarkers associated with biological effects such as disease or adverse events.
3rd Millennium has released ARDAS (Array Repository and Data Analysis System) 2.0, a platform for microarray data management and analysis.
ARDAS includes a LIMS for managing the collection of data from two-color spotted arrays; an Analysis Information Management System (AIMS) that integrates a workflow engine with computational tools for the analysis of two-color and Affymetrix data; and a data warehouse for storing both raw and normalized data sets.