Appistry has selected Benjamin Darbro, the director of the Cytogenetics and Molecular Laboratory at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics, and his team as the winner of its inaugural Appistry Pipeline Challenge.
Darbro's team will receive a complete hardware and software system from Appistry that they will use to develop a pipeline for next-generation sequencing-based genomics testing. The pipeline, which will also include other open-source and commercial tools, will be used to integrate and analyze the results of a concurrently run whole-exome sequencing assay and a SNP containing chromosomal microarray. Specifically, it will be used to calculate patient specific, genome-wide, and NGS performance metrics for various types of genetic variations detected by the test.
Ron Appel, co-founder and executive director of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, was honored with the BioAlps Award 2014 in recognition of his contributions to the creation and successful development of the SIB.
The Genetic Information Research Institute has appointed Weidong Bao and Kenji Kojima to serve as co-editors of Repbase Reports, an e-journal devoted to organizing, studying, and archiving the diverse and rapidly growing information on repetitive DNA elements.
Bao has been a staff scientist and database curator at GIRI since 2008. Prior to that, he was a research assistant at the Beijing Genomics Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and he worked on the Human Genome Project at the BGI. Bao received his MS and his PhD in molecular genetics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Kojima has been a staff scientist and database curator at GIRI since 2009. Prior to that, he was a research fellow at several institutions in Japan, including the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Graduate School of Bioscience and Biotechnology, University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, and Kyoto University's Institute for Chemical Research. Kojima obtained a Masters of Integrated Biosciences and a PhD in Frontier Sciences from the University of Tokyo.