Microsoft

US Patent 8,050,870. Identifying associations using graphical models. Inventors: David Heckerman, Jonathan Carlson, Carl Kadie. Assignee: Microsoft

By Uduak Grace Thomas

California Institute of Technology, Canon, Krassen Dimitrov, Hitachi, Fujifilm, Receptors, Wayne State University, Affymetrix, Qimoda, Microsoft

Researchers at Virginia Tech; the University of North Carolina, Charlotte; and the J. Craig Venter Institute will have free access to the Azure cloud platform as part of a two-year agreement between the NSF and Microsoft.

Microsoft Research launched a beta release of the next version of the Microsoft Biology Foundation toolkit and a coding contest to develop applications for the software.

At a meeting of the Pistoia Alliance last week, six vendors unveiled four cloud-based proof-of-concept platforms designed to provide a service for pharma to store and mine proprietary and public gene databases.

Julia Dan, Paul Tu, Joyce Peng

The study, which surveyed more than 2,000 people, found that the "results of a direct-to-consumer genomic risk test do not affect health-related behavior."

GeneSpring GX 11.5, Geneious Pro 5.3 Beta, NCBI Blast on Windows Azure cloud, Bio-Formats 4.2.1, MolQuest 2.3, DevNet, LabSolutions 5.3, PubDNA Finder, SciVerse Applications beta, Amazon Cluster GPU Instances

The Microsoft development team is asking the scientific community to submit research scenarios that will help the company develop new capabilities for version 2.0 of its MBF toolkit, scheduled for release next summer.