Bio Saga Blog - A Chronicle of Life Sciences & Informatics

Today, Singapore continues to capitalize on its geographic location as one of the crossroads of the world to grow life science companies. About 70 airlines serve Singapore, making it a gateway to Southeast Asia. As a testament to their commitment to the life science industry in the 21st century, Singapore built two state-of-the-art biomedical research parks. The Biopolis, a biomedical research complex of seven buildings that houses 2,000 scientists, opened in September 2003. The first tenants were the Genome Institute of Singapore and the Bioinformatics Institute. Buildings named Centros, Genome, Matrix, Nanos, and Proteos hold biomedical research institutes of the Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR), which oversees scientific efforts under the Ministry of Trade and Industry. The Biopolis tenants share high-quality technical services, such as DNA sequencing, proteomics, NMR, and FACS (flow activated cell sorting) facilities. The Biomedical Sciences group of Singapore...

In their current study, published in the online edition of the journal Nature , Conboy and her team found that old muscle produces elevated levels of a molecule called TGF-beta, which is known to inhibit muscle growth. The researchers then showed that the muscle-deteriorating effects of TGF-beta can be reversed by blocking its pathway in old mice. In the experiments, the researchers used RNA interference, which can silence specific genes, to inhibit the molecules that act downstream of TGF-beta to prevent cells from multiplying. They then locally injured the muscles of treated mice, as well as untreated old and young mice, by injecting a small amount of snake venom, which killed muscle tissue in the immediate vicinity. After five days, the team found that the young mice were able to produce healthy cells to replace damaged tissue. The treated older mice, whose inhibitory pathways were suppressed, were able to regenerate new cells in much the same way. Not surprisingly, old untreate...

In the series of blogs on the aftermath of GINA, first it was the consumers GINA Aftermath - Consumers Still Wary of Genetic Tests and now its the turn of the firms Gene Testing Questioned by Regulators , Consumer Genomics Firms Confused by California's Actions; State Seeks Federal Solution be is consumer or the firm no body is spared, as President Bush often quips "justice is served" and all are same in the eyes of Democracy. Well will Mr.Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger come up with a quick solution for this?

Background: CRANKITE is a suite of programs for simulating backbone conformations of polypeptides and proteins. The core of the suite is an efficient Metropolis Monte Carlo sampler of backbone conformations in continuous three-dimensional space in atomic details. Methods: In contrast to other programs relying on local Metropolis moves in the space of dihedral angles, our sampler utilizes local crankshaft rotations of rigid peptide bonds in Cartesian space. Results: The sampler allows fast simulation and analysis of secondary structure formation and conformational changes for proteins of average length. Do you want to know more?

Recently took a peek at the new version of UniProt. It has some exciting features on customized searches, filtering results using key words, customize the results view and cross references to Public databases including the 3D- viewers. Try taking the SITE tour on the right hand side panel. http://beta.uniprot.org. This is a beta version of the their new web site, most welcome to give your feedback . Please take into account that some functions are incomplete and many help pages are still preliminary. beta.uniprot.org

In keeping with Roche's commitment to developing cancer therapies, the company has acquired worldwide exclusive rights to an early stage cancer therapy that is being co-developed by Belgian biopharmaceutical firm Thrombogenics and Swedish antibody developer BioInvent. Under the agreement the two companies will share an upfront payment of EUR50mn (US$78mn) plus up to EUR450mn (US$700mn) based on reaching pre-agreed milestones. The two companies will also receive royalties from eventual product sales, with a 60% share for Thrombogenics and 40% going to BioInvent. The two original developers have retained a co-promotion option covering the Benelux, Nordic and Baltic

Dr. Ronald Collman talks about exciting new discoveries on HIV, the virus that has taken 25 million lives. Dr. Ronald Collman , professor of medicine in microbiology, virus/cell/molecular core director, Penn Center for AIDS Research, University of Pennsylvania.He describes the molecular structure, pathology, and with great insight, the incredible discoveries that might just help us conquer HIV. Listen to the Original audio source

Here is a abstract that i had submitted at the 3D sig:Structral Bioinformatics at the 1st Structural Bioinformatics Meeting at ISMB 29-30 July 2004, Glasgow, Scotland, UK. I do not know how relevant is the issue to this day. I am interested in working further in this area and i am interested in collaborating. Do let me know your comments also pour your suggestions on how to further this study. In silico methods can be used to design protein, based on stability and functionality using computational methods rather than laboratory procedures (Comet et al., 2000). The changes taking place due to the transfer of motif region from human Catechol-O-methyltansferase to rat Catechol-O-methyltransferase can be studied effectively using computational methods. This will provide insight for further development of the study about the function of neurotransmitter region of catechol-O-methyltransferase and its involvement in the Parkinson’s disease. Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) catalyzes the t...

The first of its kind - SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE alert service which also provides manually annotated sentences for the keywords of YOUR preference Highly accurate , manually annotated sentences for given keywords. Daily scientific literature updates at your desktop along with extracted facts - manually curated. Provision to change keywords with your changing research preferences. Annotated sentences and abstracts get stored in your profile, as and when they get updated in PubMed. Classify and create your own datasets of annotated facts. Enhanced experiences of reading & analyzing literature. Access your profile / datasets from anytime, anywhere. Discover and Create newer relations from scientific facts classified by the XTractor™ Community. Tag your favorite abstracts and share them across other users. Much more faster and an Absolutely Free Service PRODUCT HIGHLIGHTS Abstract Summarization The XTractor™ system would provide extracted relations in addition to id...

Previously blogging on GINA Dawn of the GATTACA era! now Industry Survey Shows: The surveyors found that only five percent of consumers said that they were “very likely” to take a disease-specific genetic test in the next few years, and 15 percent said they would be “likely” to take one. A total of 35 percent said that they would not submit to genetic tests, with 14 percent citing concerns about privacy, 5 percent saying they would not want to know about the results of their tests, and 16 percent saying both reasons would compel them to avoid genetic tests. Although more than 50 percent of those who responded said that they are concerned about getting cancer or heart disease, only 4 percent of those said they had taken a genetic test for a particular disease. Two-thirds of those who did have a genetic test were advised to do so by a doctor. The respondents had about the same comfort level of sharing genetic information with their spouses or partners as with their doctors, 72...

Boehringer Ingelheim will acquire Actimis Pharmaceuticals through a structured buyout in which Boehringer Ingelheim will acquire shares of Actimis depending on the achievement of several successive milestones with Actimis’ leading asthma compound AP768. If AP768, currently in Phase I development, is successfully advanced into a Phase III, Boehringer Ingelheim will own 100% of Actimis’ shares. Upon successful completion of the entire development program, the total deal will be worth $515 million. AP768 interacts with CRTH21, a target for asthma and allergic rhinitis. Previous to the currently ongoing Phase I trial, the compound was shown to have a more effective mechanism of action across multiple available animal models compared to currently marketed leukotriene receptor antagonists , according to the companies.

A new computer-based method of analyzing cellular activity has correctly predicted the anti-tumour activity of several molecules. Research published today in BioMed Central's open access journal Molecular Cancer describes 'CoMet' – a tool that studies the integrated machinery of the cell and predicts those components that will have an effect on cancer. Jeffrey Skolnick, in collaboration with John McDonald, led a team from the Georgia Institute of Technology who have developed this new strategy. As Skolnick explains, "This opens up the possibility of novel therapeutics for cancer and develops our understanding of why such metabolites work. CoMet provides a deeper understanding of the molecular mechanisms of cancer". Identification of metabolites with anticancer properties by Computational Metabolomics The small molecules that are naturally produced in cells are called metabolites. Enzymes, the biological catalysts that produce and consume these metabolites are cr...

The last time i blogged on stem cells it was rather about a challenge in Fresh hurdle for stem cell hunt , but this time its more on a positive note and fairly quite an interesting and welcome news... a SERENDIPITY! Inspired by a chance discovery during another experiment, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have created a small molecule that stimulates nerve stem cells to begin maturing into nerve cells in culture. "This provides a critical starting point for neuro-regenerative medicine and brain cancer chemotherapy," said Dr. Jenny Hsieh, assistant professor of molecular biology and senior author of the paper, Small-molecule activation of neuronal cell fate, Jay W Schneider, Zhengliang Gao, Shijie Li, Midhat Farooqi, Tie-Shan Tang, Ilya Bezprozvanny, Doug E Frantz, Jenny Hsieh SUMMARY: We probed an epigenetic regulatory path from small molecule to neuronal gene activation. Isoxazole small molecules triggered robust neuronal differentiation in adult neural ...

In its simplest sense, we imagine that learning occurs through a series of positive and negative rewards. Some actions lead to pleasure, others to pain, and it seems reasonable to expect that people will repeat the actions with pleasurable results and avoid those that ended in pain. Yet, we all know people who aren't deterred by the idea of punishment. We all know people who never seem to learn. Could there be a physical reason, hidden in their genes? Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... more Klein, T. (2007). Genetically Determined Differences in Learning from Errors. Science, 318 (5856), 1642-1645.

A number of online and offline genome are viewers available, each with it’s own set of pros and cons. Here is an overview three. Artemis Artemis is a genome viewer available from Sanger Institute. Its a java based tool with a 3-paned interface window that depicts the genome at various resolutions. Alternating between the different resolutions is a bit tricky but once you get a hold of it shouldn’t be difficult. There is a also search tool that allows your to track down the particular feature that you’re looking for. A great feature of Artemis is that it allows you to edit the sequence annotations and features. Although the tool isn’t perfect and is a bit finicky at times, it gets the job done. Artemis supports the most common filetypes -EMBL, GENBANK, FASTA or raw format. Extra sequence features can be added in in EMBL, GENBANK or GFF format. The best thing I like about Artemis is that there is a web version as well as an offline version, which means once you get used to it you ca...

If you love spending time on Facebook, but want to keep on working while “Facebooking” (or whatever the correct verb is) don’t fear. Here are 4 (5) biology-related Facebook applications, most of which you can claim to be working while using. F@H Protein Researcher Folding@Home ( F@H ) is a distributed computing project where individuals allow their free CPU time to create a world-wide super-computer that is used for the study of protein folding. The Protein Researcher Facebook application tracks user statistics for the F&H and includes team pages/walls, a profile box with your individual statistics, and ranked standings. SciBook - Science Social Network SciBook is a Life science social network for scientists. It’s a way for scientists to add the publications they are reading or have successfully published to their profile and discover others on Facebook interested in the same papers. Latest PHD Comics This application puts PHD comics on your profile. It updates automatically, ...

Protein domains are the structural and functional units of proteins. The ability to parse proteins into different domains is important for effective classification, understanding of protein structure, function, and evolution and is hence biologically relevant. Several computational methods are available to identify domains in the sequence. Domain finding algorithms often employ stringent thresholds to recognize sequence domains. Identification of additional domains can be tedious involving intense computation and manual intervention but can lead to better understanding of overall biological function. In this context, the problem of identifying new domains in the unassigned regions of a protein sequence assumes a crucial importance. Accumulation of domain information of sequence homologues can substantially aid prediction of new domains. In this paper, we propose a computationally intensive, multi-step bioinformatics protocol as a web server named as PURE (Prediction of Unassigned REg...

A protein related to heart disease and Alzheimer's is found to be a factor in HIV. The apolipoprotein (apo) E4 isoform has been implicated in neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. Now, investigators at the Gladstone Institutes, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and the Infectious Disease Clinical Research Program, Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, Maryland have shown that this troubling protein is a risk factor for AIDS progression rates and promotes entry of HIV into cells. Do you want to read more?

Many of you involved in structure based drug discovery will know very well about the numerous problems and errors in the data found in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) especially concerning the ligand structures. There have been a lot of publications about such errors, e.g. in Jones et al. J Mol. Biol. (1997) 267 :727, and I heard various conference presentations about this topic too, e.g. by Gerard Kleywegt (University of Uppsala), titled “Protein crystallography: not as simple as ABC then?” at Bryn Mawr, Philadelphia (15-19 October 2007) eChemInfo meeting . The errors are often blamed on the low resolution of the structures involving large protein structures (often thousands of atoms). One would assume that the small molecule crystal structures of the Cambridge Structural Database ( CSD ) do not have such errors, since they have much higher resolution and dealing with small molecules. Let me correct that wrong assumption! Do you want to know more?

Several times i have discussed the the topic of anti-cancer targets, Novel Enzyme Inhibitor Paves Way for New Cancer Drug: Agent Proves Effective Against Melanoma Cells; Researchers Find that a Small Molecule Can Activate an Important Cancer Suppressor Gene. The development of resistance to anticancer chemotherapeutic agents remains a large problem. In some cases, such resistance is associated with altered control of a cellular process known as translation, which is central to the generation of proteins. New data, generated by Jerry Pelletier and colleagues, at McGill University, Montreal, have identified a drug that can enhance the sensitivity of mouse cancer cells to standard anticancer chemotherapeutic agents. In the study, small molecules were screened for their ability to inhibit the initiation of translation by modifying the function of a protein known as eIF4A, which has a central role in translation initiation. A class of natural drugs known as cyclopenta[b]benzofuran flavag...

Invitrogen Corporation and Applera Corporation today announced that their Boards of Directors have approved a definitive merger agreement, under which Invitrogen will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Applera's Applied Biosystems Group a cash and stock transaction valued at $6.7 billion. This strategic combination will create a global leader in biotechnology reagents and systems generating approximately $3.5 billion in combined sales, with significant commercial, operational and technical scale, uniquely positioned to accelerate and drive new discoveries and commercial applications. The combined company will have a major presence in key growth markets and exceptional technical capabilities in the areas of genetic analysis, proteomics , cell biology and cell systems. Following the close of the transaction, the combined organization will be named Applied Biosystems, Inc. and will have its corporate headquarters in Carlsbad, California. Under the terms of the merger agreement, ...

The European Commission has awarded €4.5 million ($7 million) to a consortium of 32 research organizations, universities, and companies from 13 countries to determine how to transform Europe’s biomedical data resources into a transnational “sustainable integrative bioinformatics network” for the life sciences. The consortium is led by the European Bioinformatics Institute. The first year and a half of this project, called ELIXIR, for European Life-science Infrastructure for Biological Information, is aimed at gathering input, performing technical-feasibility studies, and doing user surveys among researchers who generate and use data, and develop tools. Much like the Oxford English Dictionary, which will remain useful as long as people speak English, so, too, will “the infrastructure for biological information … continue as long as people are interested in biology, health, and medicine,” she said. But provisions must be made to allow that to happen, including upgrading the infrast...

Hoping to bring together “a million minds” to annotate proteins, a team of researchers has launched a large-scale, community-based project called WikiProteins that combines automated text, data, and concept mining, manual annotation, and a newly developed software component called the Knowlet. The project, which aims to annotate proteins and protein-related biomedical concepts such as diseases or organisms, will be powered by a platform technology designed by a group of scientists and a Rockville, Md.-based startup and will be made available free of charge in perpetuity for the scientific community and the public. Called WikiProfessional , the platform “in a technical sense powers the community-version that we have now put out there, but you could take exactly the same technology platform and install it locally at a pharmaceutical company for them to do drug-lead discovery,” said Albert Mons, a computational linguist and co-founder of the startup, Knewco. “Philosophically we wante...

By studying the variety of chemical substances and their structures recorded in the CAS REGISTRY SM database, Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) scientists have discovered that a limited number of molecular shapes are the frameworks for a disproportionately large percentage of reported substances. As shown in the CAS study , half of the known organic chemical substances can be described by just 143 shapes. The analysis, published in The Journal of Organic Chemistry , explains why certain molecular frameworks are more likely to be used in new compounds and may also help identify new regions of chemistry space ripe for exploration.

GSK: Money-Green Outside, Pink-Slip Inside GSK is indeed wielding the ax today and tomorrow. I'm hearing that that the smallest cuts are around 40% of the entire research staff at the various sites. This is big, and it's bad. . . says Derek GlaxoSmithKline has been going through some sort of mid-life crisis recently. Their chairman, Jean-Pierre Garnier, just retired amidst the mutter of angry shareholders , for one thing. And the company has been splashing out on some very flashy acquisitions, such as the Sirtris deal which has just now completed. This is all going on against the backdrop of the Avandia disaster, and a perceived drought of current clinical successes . Now the company is cutting their own head count in research, to what sounds like a pretty serious degree. There have been substantial cuts at their sites in Italy and the UK, and the Research Triangle and Pennsylvania sites are getting it even harder, from what I'm hearing. Some chemistry areas are losi...

Anyone who has ever built a website knows that maintaining it is a lot of work. There’s just making sure it hasn’t gone offline because the httpd daemon died. Constant monitoring for script kiddies and their SQL injections. Not to mention continually feeding it with fresh content, lest your audience become bored and desert. I’ve always thought it would be cool to build a site that could more or less look after itself. There’s a myriad of content management systems to choose from, most of which are somewhat hackable in whatever language they happen to be coded in. One of the more mature in this respect is Drupal - which is the engine behind Eureka! Science News . It’s a fully-automated science news portal, using a bunch of customised Drupal modules to aggregate, cluster, categorise and rank articles. First impressions are excellent. Coders will enjoy this post at Drupal explaining how it all works.

Previously blogging on the topic of regenerative medicine in Regenerative Medicine Start-Up Created out of ORNL . A Nobel Prize-winning scientist says it could be tougher than first thought to harness the healing power of stem cells in medicine. It had been hoped a single "master" cell could potentially be used to repair all damage in a single organ. Stem cells may be more varied than previously thought. Professor Mario Capecchi , from the University of Utah, found surprising clues that different stem cells might be working together in the same organ. This means experimental treatments relying on the wrong type might fail. Professor Capecchi, writing in the Nature Genetics, said the finding suggested stem cell biology could be "more complicated" than previously thought, which could be bad news for patients hoping for the swift arrival of new therapies. Bmi1 plays an essential part in the self-renewal of hematopoietic and neural stem cells. To investigate its role...

At JGI, we use whole-genome shotgun sequencing. This is a technique for determining the DNA sequence of a genome by randomly shearing the DNA, sequencing multiple fragments whose sequences overlap, and inferring the original sequence by reassembling the fragments. Three sizes of fragments are sequenced, 2-4 kb (kilobase, or 1000 bases), 8-10 kb, and 40 kb. This explanation follows the procedure for 2-4-kb fragments. Animation of the JGI production sequencing process Do you want to know more?

Fastest supercomputer in the world proves one in a million billion Roadrunner was always expected to be fast out of the blocks. And after a test run one night in the city of Poughkeepsie, New York, its creators are far from disappointed. Built from microchips originally destined for games consoles, Roadrunner is the world's latest supercomputer. Yesterday it was officially crowned the fastest computer around, having performed a record million billion calculations per second. As an indication of how fast this is, manufacturers explained that if 6 billion people were to do one sum a second on calculator, it would take 46 years to do what RoadRunner could do in a day. The world's first supercomputer, the Cray 1 built in the mid-1970s, would take 1,500 years to finish a calculation that Roadrunner would perform in two hours. For six months, the computer will direct its formidable processing power at scientific problems. It will analyse how HIV vaccines should best be administered, ...

GlaxoSmithKline has inked a five year, $25 million collaboration deal with the Disease Institute of Boston to conduct on immunoinflammation research. GSK and IDI researchers will develop joint grant proposals in targeted areas of research under an Alliance Research grant program. GSK gets first dibs on any drug targets identified through the collaboration. "GSK is committed to becoming a world leader within 3 years in drug discovery of immuno-inflammation," said Jose Carlos Gutierrez-Ramos, head of the Immuno-Inflammation Center of Excellence for Drug Discovery of GSK. "This agreement fits perfectly with our strategy to pursue scientific excellence and technologies both internally and externally." Do you want to know more?

goosh.org - the unofficial google shell ( http://goosh.org /). It is pretty neat and useful in its neonatal state itself, like to read a feed, you can type, for eg: r http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/11136726768885096694/label/cbn-roll and gets default 4 latest feeds, or you can check out a ncbi accession by typing, for eg: NP_001108376 and get to the Fugu fish refseq link. The most useful thing is the fact that it it text based and quite easy to parse visually as well as via scripts. Another cool feature for me right now is the shell translation, like to get the english word for the norwegian word 'hvor', all I have to do is type: t no en hvor which correctly says: translating "hvor" from "no" to "en": "where" More discussion going on at http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/02/222234&from=rss . Enjoy!

Battelle Ventures has spun out a firm from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), with an initial $1.5 million seed investment. The company, called NellOne Therapeutics, will develop regenerative medicines. The funding will be tranched based on key technical milestones. Towards a "holy grail" in human medicine: the ability to restore organs damaged through trauma, disease, cancer, or even the normal aging process. Tissue or organ repair has been the ultimate goal of surgery from ancient times to the present day. Clearly, there is a lot of interest in the regeneration of tissues, and tissue repair in organisms is within reach. However, we are a long way from understanding how to coax the human body into regenerating complex body parts after injury or disease. As an example, regeneration of amputated limbs in amphibians - “epimorphic” regeneration which includes cellular dedifferentiation in the injured tissues of the limb stump and proliferat...

A team of scientists have found a way to make human cells produce magnetic nanoparticles by introducing a gene from bacteria. The gene MagA was tested in human kidney cells, though the investigators believe that it will probably be most useful in tracking cell movement in transgenic animals via MRI. “MagA can be thought of as the equivalent of green fluorescent protein but for magnetic resonance imaging,” says Xiaoping Hu, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology . Dr. Hu anticipates that MagA could find similar applications to green fluorescent protein, with the advantage that magnetic fields can penetrate tissues more easily than light. MagA comes from magnetotactic bacteria, which can sense the Earth's magnetic field. It encodes a protein that transports dissolved iron across cell membranes. When put into animal cells, MagA triggers the accumulation of lumps of iron oxide a few nanometers wide, the researchers explain...

Novartis has decided to acquire Protez Pharmaceuticals for $100 million at close of the agreement. Novartis will pay up to $300 million if certain clinical milestones, regulatory approvals, and commercial targets are achieved. Protez will become a stand-alone subsidiary of Novartis, maintaining its operations in Malvern, PA. Protez’ only clinical candidate, PZ-601, is an injectable antibiotic in the carbapenems class of agents. Protez commenced a 100-patient Phase II study for PZ-601 in May 2008 in the U.S. to evaluate the safety and efficacy of PZ-601 in patients with complicated skin and skin structure infections, including cellulites, abscesses, infected wounds, and ulcers. The firms believe that this compound has the potential to be used in bacterial infections resistant to other medicines including MRSA. “This acquisition,” remarks Christopher M. Cashman, Protez president and CEO, “underscores our company’s infectious disease expertise and novel antimicrobial programs. We beli...

As the cost of sequencing a single human genome drops rapidly, with one company predicting a price of $100 per person in five years, soon the only reason not to look at your "personal genome" will be fear of what bad news lies in your genes. University of California, Berkeley, scientists, however, have found a welcome reason to delve into your genetic heritage: to find the slight genetic flaws that can be fixed with remedies as simple as vitamin or mineral supplements . "There are over 600 human enzymes that use vitamins or minerals as cofactors, and this study reports just what we found by studying one of them," Rine said. "What this means is that, even if the odds of an individual having a defect in one gene is low, with 600 genes, we are all likely to have some mutations that limit one or more of our enzymes." The subtle effects of variation in enzyme activity may well account for conflicting results of some clinical trials, including the confusing data...

A team of scientists from The Scripps Research Institute found an increased concentration of certain metabolites in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of monkeys with SIV-induced central nervous system (CNS) disease, a model for HIV patients with CNS damage. The investigators used global metabolomics to assess the levels of metabolites in CSF before and after SIV-induced encephalitis appeared. They found elevated levels in four categories: carnitine, acyl-carnitines, fatty acids, and phospholipids. Consistent with this, the team reports, a protein known to be important in the generation of fatty acids was increased in the brains of monkeys with SIV-induced encephalitis. The elevation in free fatty acids and lysophospholipids correlated with increased expression of specific phospholipases in the brains of animals with encephalitis, according to the researchers. One of these, phospholipase A2 isoenzyme, is capable of releasing a number of the fatty acids identified. It was expressed in d...

A little over ten years ago, Dr. Elaine Johnson obtained funding from the National Science Foundation to start Bio-Link , an Advanced Technology Education center, focused on biotechnology. Since that time, Dr. Johnson has become a national leader in biotech education, enlisting the country's top educators and industry captains to ensure that community college students receive a quality education and the best preparation possible for entering the workforce. In this radio interview from Tech Nation, Dr. Johnson talks with Dr. Moira Gunn about the easiest way to a biotech career. A Career in Biotech Tech Nation 23 minutes, 10.7mb, recorded 2008-05-21 Play

The United States Department of Agriculture has released the complete genetic sequences of 150 different avian influenza viruses and will make the information available through the National Institutes of Health’s GenBank. The USDA said on Friday that the sequencing data is part of the federal government’s Initiative on Avian Influenza, and that this information will be combined with studies that compare the viruses’ ability to infect poultry such as chickens, turkeys, and domestic ducks. This virus research that generated this data was conducted by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service’s Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL), by the University of Georgia, the Ohio State University, the University of Delaware, and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. "The project's ultimate goal is to sequence 900 avian influenza viruses from the SEPRL repository," David Suarez, a researcher with SEPRL, said in a statement. "These include avian influenza viruses col...

Thermo Fisher Scientific said after the close of the market on Monday that it has acquired Chemito Technologies, a Mumbai, India-based supplier of analytical instruments for life sciences and environmental monitoring applications. Thermo Fisher said that Chemito has annual revenues of roughly $10 million and manufactures its own instruments for gas chromatography, atomic absorption, and UV-Vis spectroscopy. The Waltham, Mass.-based firm will integrate Chemito into its Analytical Technologies segment. “The strong reputation Chemito has developed through its extensive sales network, now complemented by Thermo Fisher’s breadth of scientific and environmental instrumentation, extends the services we can provide to our customers throughout India,” Thermo Fisher President and CEO Marijn Dekkers said in a statement. The purchase price was not disclosed.

The CDD [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/cdd/cdd.shtml ] and the its search tool [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Structure/cdd/wrpsb.cgi ] has been recently updated. Also check out the latest approach for "automatically assigning subcellular locations" to protein from Newberg and Murphy [ http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jprobs/asap/abs/pr7007626.html ].