PALO ALTO, Calif.--Sun Microsystems reported that its Starfire Server performed favorably running sequence comparisons using a bioinformatics application.

BETHESDA, Md.--Federal Data, an information technology company specializing in government contracts, was awarded a five-year, $19.5 million job by the US Food and Drug Administra-tion's National Center for Toxicological Research.

SAN DIEGO--Sequenom has hired Charles Rodi as vice-president, molecular biology, and Paul Heaney as vice-president of advanced systems. Both will report to Charles Cantor, the company's chief scientific officer.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--The University of California has agreed to acquire Affymetrix's GeneChip technology under the company's academic access program.

THE WOODLANDS, Texas--Lexicon Genetics has launched a subscription internet program, allowing commercial and academic or nonprofit institutions to access OmniBank, its proprietary genomics library and database.

BOULDER, Colo.--Genomica has licensed its Discovery Manager software to AstraZeneca R&D Molndal of Sweden.

CAMBRIDGE, UK--Synomics has launched Alliance, a software integration architecture system that the company said is designed to allow the life sciences industry to implement a "sustainable" integration strategy and deliver integrated R&D applications to the desktop.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The research software company Spotfire announced a deal that will allow Molecular Dynamics to offer Spotfire Pro visual discovery software along with its precommercial Microarray Technology Access Programs and its commercial microarray systems.

HEIDELBERG, Germany--Lion Bioscience has launched SRS 6, the new version of its database query and navigation system for the life science community.

EVELEIGH, Australia--eBioinformatics, the bioinformatics tools provider here formerly known as EnCompass Bioinformatics, will commercially release its first product, BioNavigator v3.0, the week of July 4.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Dispelling industry rumors that Molecular Applications Group is up for sale, Debbie Yu, acting CEO, said the company is seeking partnerships, but not a buyer.

WASHINGTON--To meet the biomedical field s increasing demands for skilled computational biologists, an advisory panel submitted a report this month urging the US National Institutes of Health to establish a national network of bioinformatics research and education centers. The report, the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative, was presented June 3 by a working group on biomedical computing to the institutes chief, Harold Varmus, who reportedly commented that it was excellent and painstakingly done.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.--After a four-week trial of automated capillary electrophoresis DNA sequencing instruments from Perkin-Elmer and Amersham Pharmacia Biotech, the US Department of Energy s Joint Genome Institute announced last week that it will install 24 of Amersham s MegaBACE sequencers, tripling the capacity of its human genome production sequencing facility here. Elbert Branscomb, the institute s director, told BioInform the choice was based on technical considerations as well as on the ease with which the machinery could be installed and the level of support provided by Amersham. The MegaBACE devices, which the institute will lease, sell for $200,000 apiece.

OAKLAND, Calif.--Douglas Brutlag has been appointed acting chief scientific officer of Pangea Systems. He will remain a full-time professor of biochemistry and medicine and director of the bioinformatics resource at Stanford University School of Medicine.

PRINCETON, NJ--The way Dale Pfost sees it, single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) represent the most commercially and scientifically compelling opportunity of the genomics revolution. Associating SNPs to diseases is what Pfost s company, Orchid Biocomputer, has set out to do.

SAN FRANCISCO--A complex and demanding period of analysis and synthesis lies just ahead for the genomics community, according to speakers who addressed 450 attendees at In Silico Biology and the 8th Bioinformatics and Genome Research Conferences, two meetings held here June 8-10 and 14-15 by Cambridge Healthtech Institute. The group also hosted a Proteomics conference June 9-11.

ROCKVILLE, Md.--The Institute for Genomic Research announced that the completed sequence of the Thermotoga maritima genome, the eighth it has sequenced, is now available through a microbial database at http://www.tigr.org.

HAYWARD, Calif.--Lynx Therapeutics announced that it will collaborate with Oxagen of Oxford, UK, to discover and validate disease-associated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The program will initially focus on inflammatory bowel disease, but may be extended to other common disorders.

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY--IBM has founded the Deep Computing Institute, a $29 million research institute to foster collaboration between experts in academia and industry in addressing challenging business and scientific problems. Bioinformatics professionals on the institute's advisory boar

GAITHERSBURG, Md.--Data Unlimited International released Starfruit DNA, a new DNA laboratory information management system with a system architecture specifically designed for clinical and forensic DNA testing.

TOKYO--The Japanese Patent Office here has installed TimeLogic's DeCypher Reconfigurable Accelerated Computing Engine (RACE) Model D36B0 Computational Genomic Accelerator. According to TimeLogic, the new DeCypher RACE is benchmarked at processing 36,000 Smith-Waterman accelerated dynami

PARIS--Genset and Algene Biotechnologies of Montreal have formed a strategic alliance for research into Alzheimer's disease.

SÃO PAULO--Amersham Pharmacia Biotech's high-throughput DNA sequencing system, MegaBace 1000, was picked recently by the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and the State of São Paolo Research Foundation to speed up efforts here to discover cancer-causing genes.

WALTHAM, Mass.--Genome Therapeutics has completed a sequencing contract for researchers from the Cancer Research Centre at Queen's University in Belfast, UK. As part of the agreement, Genome Therapeutics sequenced several regions of the human genome for the institute.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland--DeCode Genetics has extended its contract with Affymetrix to gain access to GeneChip technology for use in gene expression monitoring and genotyping applications.