WALNUT CREEK,Calif.--The US Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute has purchased an additional 60 MegaBace 1000 high-throughput DNA sequencers from Amersham Pharmacia Biotech, Nycomed Amersham's life science business.

ROCKVILLE, Md.--Scientists at Celera Genomics, who have completed sequencing the equivalent of more than 500 million base pairs of the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly, genome, have said that the organism now appears to be larger than originally thought.

WATERLOO, Ontario--Open Text announced here that Glaxo Wellcome has chosen its Livelink collaborative knowledge management software to automate business processes, enable workgroup collaboration, and improve the capture and reuse of corporate knowledge in Glaxo's Canadian operations.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Rhône-Poulenc Rorer has expanded its almost two-year-old agreement with Incyte to include a bioinformatics collaboration, and access to Incyte's LifeSeq Gold assembled database and LifeArray expression analysis software.

OAKLAND, Calif.--Affymetrix has licensed computational tools from Pangea Systems to streamline the design process for its GeneChip arrays.

BASEL, Switzerland--GeneData, a privately-held bioinformatics company based here, has announced the release of GD Phylosopher, a functional genomics-based target identification system that it developed with the help of Bayer's pharmaceutical anti-infectives research unit, which is also the fir

PRINCETON, NJ--AxCell Biosciences, the wholly owned subsidiary of Cytogen, signed a letter of intent with InforMax to market AxCell's proteomics database as part of an enterprise bioinformatics solution to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and agricultural industries.

NEW HAVEN, Conn.--Bioin-formatics played a critical part in enabling CuraGen to discover 55,000 more coding SNPs, nearly doubling its cSNP database to 115,000--25 percent of the estimated total cSNPs in the human genome.

HEIDELBERG, Germany--The diversity of topics addressed by 10 tutorials, 34 peer-reviewed papers, 8 keynote lectures, and 167 posters at the Seventh International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology was an indicator that computational biology has come into its own as a professional discipline, organizers of the meeting told BioInform.

CLEVELAND--NetGenics has begun collaborating with Pfizer to use the software firm s Synergy bioinformatics platform to integrate multidisciplinary research initiatives across Pfizer s global offices. This effort will connect drug discovery data and scientists across the biology and chemistry spectrum at the drug company.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Ciphergen Biosystems here coined the term phenomics to describe the combination of proteomics and phenotype analysis encompassed by two methods for finding novel markers for diseases using protein profiles rather than genetics. One approach focuses on standard 2-dimensional gels, while a new technology applies DNA-chips to proteomics.

BOULDER, Colo.--Since Teresa Ayers was named CEO of Genomica in July, not a week has gone by without an announcement from the pharmacogenomics software company as it signs new customers and joins alliances. Biognosis, Parke-Davis, University of Oxford, and the Wellcome Trust Centre have licensed the Discovery Manager product. In addition, the company, along with PE Biosystems and Oxagen, has signed a collaborative agreement to develop software for high-throughput genotyping.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Affymetrix announced that six institutes of the US National Institutes of Health have agreed to a broad GeneChip technology access contract.

OXFORD, UK--Oxford Molecular has released new versions of its Diva data analysis and visualization product and Cache, a desktop chemistry software package.

OAKLAND, Calif.-- Pangea Systems has appointed Robert Williamson as senior vice-president of marketing, business development, and e-commerce, and added Michael Savage to the company's board of directors.

BOULDER, Colo.--Teresa Ayers is the new CEO at Genomica, a pharmacogenomics software company. She will work together with Thomas Marr, who continues as president, chief scientist, and director of Genomica.

ALAMEDA, Calif.--GeneTrace Systems has been awarded two Small Business Innovation Research grants to conduct functional genomics studies.

FULLERTON, Calif.--Beckman Coulter has unveiled its Ceq 2000 Base-Calling software version 1.1 for use with its Ceq 2000 DNA Analysis System.

THE WOODLANDS, Texas--Lexicon Genetics is using Paracel's GeneMatcher genomic data search accelerator to assist its efforts to characterize the biologic function of new genes being discovered through Lexicon's gene-trapping technology and bioinformatics platform.

SAN DIEGO--Aurora Biosciences announced a two-year collaboration in which it will allow the US National Cancer Institute use of its proprietary GenomeScreen technology to locate rare or low abundance transcripts in tumor cells.

COLUMBUS, Ohio--Visual Genomics released last week its free Bioinformatics Sequence Markup Language Basic Browser. The browser is the first in a planned line of data management, analysis, presentation, and communication products for genomics researchers.

ST. LOUIS--Washington University recently closed deals with Affymetrix for GeneChip access and Amersham Pharmacia Biotech to purchase MegaBace sequencing machines.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Spotfire has recruited William Ladd as director of bioinformatics to lead its new Bioinformatics Rapid-Application-Development group, an interdisciplinary team of computer science, biology, chemistry, and statistics specialists based here.

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--Allan Hillyard, former vice-president and chief technical officer for Base4 Bioinformatics, has joined Axys Pharmaceuticals as vice-president of information systems.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Incyte Pharmaceuticals is about to join the government s human genome sequencing project through a collaboration with the University of Washington in Seattle. The university s sequencing effort, led by Maynard Olson, professor of genetics, molecular biotechnology, and medicine, was recently awarded a three-year, $20 million grant by the US National Human Genome Research Institute, with $7 million of that to be awarded immediately.