SAN DIEGO--At the Plant and Animal Genome VIII conference here last week, several bioinformatics vendors made announcements to the 1,500 attendees and 70 exhibitors.
TimeLogic, which said it had a good fourth quarter last year, announced that Chiron, Hoffmann-La Roche, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the National Center for Genome Resources are new DeCypher clients. Other DeCypher purchases in 1999 were made by Bristol-Myers Squibb, Curagen, the European Bioinformatics Institute, Novartis Agricultural Discovery Institute, Novartis Institute for Functional Genomics, and MIT’s Whitehead Institute.
Affymetrix said it is developing arrays for Arabidopsis and Drosophila, planned for release later this year. The company was also promoting its GenFlex Tag Array, a platform for user-defined genotyping, and its collaboration with Orchid Biocomputer, through which it will provide SNP genotyping kits to researchers.
Curagen did not have a booth in the exhibit hall but instead had a poster detailing research it has done on the swine genome with Roche Vitamins using Curagen’s SeqCalling product. Martin Leach, Curagen’s director of bioinformatics, mentioned that the company is looking to hire about 20 additional bioinformatics staff this year, to add to its bioinformatics team of about 35. Workshops on Arabidopsis and rice were two of the more popular meetings at the conference.
--Matthew Dougherty