Downloads & Upgrades
The Laboratory of Computational Biology at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has released AD-ENM, a web server for analyzing dynamics of protein structures based on the elastic network model, at http://enm.lobos.nih.gov. Functions include the ability to describe collective protein conformational changes using low-frequency normal modes; prediction of protein conformational changes induced by given local structural deformations; and the identification of key residues that are dynamically important to a given functional site.
The Department of Plant Science at the University of Manitoba has released BIRCH (Biological Research) A1.96, which now supports the Solaris/AMD64 platform, at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~psgendb. BIRCH includes freely available programs and databases for molecular biology that are available either through a graphic interface or the Unix command line.
ChemAxon has launched FreeWeb, a package that provides its chemical editing, viewing, search, property calculation, and database-management toolkits at no cost to freely accessible web resources being operated for non-commercial purposes. The launch follows from the "success" of the company's Academic Package, which gives all products free for academic teaching and research, ChemAxon said. FreeWeb is intended to increase the quality and capabilities of publicly accessible online chemical research resources and includes the Marvin Java applet family for creating chemical queries, viewing results, and ligand/macromolecular analysis; the JChem Base and JChem Cartridge to allow chemical searching and database management; Standardizer, which creates business rules for structure management; and Calculator Plugins to provide a range of structure-based properties interesting to researchers for content held by the provider.
LabVantage Solutions has released Sapphire R4.4. The newest version of the company's LIMS product includes enhanced scheduling capabilities, advanced analytical quality control functionality, programmable business rules, a new archiver module, improved patching capabilities, a clustering module, and other features.
People in the News
Joseph Cerro, head of informatics at Bayer Pharmaceuticals, received the 2005 Albert Einstein Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Life Sciences while serving as a delegate for the 2nd Annual Life Sciences Mission to Israel. Cerro was recognized for his work in the area of life sciences IT governance.
VizX Labs has made a number of management changes. Eric Olson, formerly scientific director, has been promoted to vice president and chief scientific officer; David Audley, formerly director of sales, is now vice president of sales; Jeff Kozlowski, formerly senior software engineer, is now director of GeneSifter development; Anna Boone, formerly accounts manager, is now the Eastern region sales manager; and Monika Kovacs has joined the company as Western region sales manager.
The US Food and Drug Administration has appointed William Slikker as the acting director of its National Center for Toxicological Research. Slikker replaces Dan Casciano, NCTR director for more than six years, who is moving to the private sector. Slikker most recently served as NCTR's deputy center director for research.