• Researchers Solve 3D Crystal Structure of GPCRs

    News Brief | A research team at Weill Cornell Medical College has solved the 3D crystal structure of a member protein in one of the most important classes of human proteins—the G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). The results were published yesterday in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

    Feb 28, 2013

  • IBM's Watson Moves Closer to Medicine

    The Atlantic | Watson is reading your medical records--or at least some case histories at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. The IBM supercomputer is learning to make diagnoses and recommend treatments.

    Feb 27, 2013

  • Sequencing the Island: Faroe Citizens to be Sequenced En Masse

    Bloomberg | The Faroe Islands' 50,000 inhabitants are offering up their DNA for research. The plan is for every citizen to be sequenced, and to use the data for medical research.

    Feb 26, 2013

  • Crick Double Helix Letter to His Son Goes on Auction Block

    New York Times | 60 years ago this week, James Watson pieced together the final pieces of a model of DNA and, together with his colleague Francis Crick, constructed the iconic double helix model. The classic paper by Crick and Watson wasn’t published in Nature for a further two months, but three weeks after the model was made, Crick relayed the discovery and its significance in a remarkable letter to his 12-year-old son Michael. “My dear Michael, Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery,” begins the letter.

    Feb 26, 2013

  • ENCODE Under Scrutiny

    In the Pipeline | The ENCODE project has received a thorough dressing down in a new Genome Biology and Evolution paper by Dan Graur and colleagues. The authors highlight six major errors in the ENCODE project that led to "absurd conclusion[s]". Derek Lowe breaks down the claims (accusations?) on his blog.

    Feb 25, 2013

  • PatientsLikeMe: Outcome Measures About to Get Crowdsourced

    Bio-IT World | Thanks to a $1.9 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, PatientsLikeMe will lead development of truly “patient-centered” health outcome measures via the world’s first open-participation research platform. Never before have crowdsourcing approaches to authoring, reviewing, and validating outcome measures been attempted on a single system, says Jamie Heywood, co-founder and chairman of the nearly 200,000-member patient network.

    Feb 25, 2013

  • No Nanopores but AGBT 2013 Showcases Plenty of New NGS Technology

    Bio-IT World | The 2013 Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference—likened by one participant as “the bastard child of a Gordon Conference and a Las Vegas Porn Convention"—may have lacked the show-stopping presentation of an Oxford Nanopore this year, but there was plenty to admire on the new technology front.

    Feb 25, 2013

  • Eric Lander Takes on the Internet for Reddit

    Reddit | Yesterday Eric Lander, President and Founding Director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, spent a couple of hours on Reddit doing an AMA open Q&A session. Questions ranged from the ridiulous to the profound, but Lander was a good sport. He weighed in on what to do to increase the attractiveness of PhD programs; the current most important scientific questions; the coolest discoveries in the 21st century; immortality; his mustache; genetics in 10-20 years; and more.

    Feb 22, 2013

  • IVF Clinic Deploys Ion Torrent Sequencing in Embryo Screening

    Bio-IT World | A reproductive clinic in New Jersey has successfully used next-generation sequencing (NGS) to screen embryos conceived in otherwise routine in vitro fertilization (IVF) cases prior to implantation. The news was reported in a talk yesterday evening at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference by Dagan Wells, a geneticist at the University of Oxford.

    Feb 22, 2013

  • N-of-One Announces First Provider Partnership with Fox Chase Cancer Center

    Bio-IT World | Following a flagship collaboration with Foundation Medicine to provide interpretative software for genome analysis in cancer patients, N-of-One has announced a new partnership with the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

    Feb 21, 2013

  • Eleven Winners Named for Breakthrough Prize

    New York Times | Yuri Milner, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, and Mark Zuckerberg have announced the winners of the first Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Eleven scientists were awarded $3 million each for their work.

    Feb 20, 2013

  • NetApp Announces New Storage Options

    eWeek |  In a media event yesterday, NetApp unveiled its first all-solid-state array, a new flash accelerator for servers, and a future new storage line coming out in 2014.

    Feb 20, 2013

  • Fruitful Market: Berry Genomics Tackles Prenatal Testing in China

    Bio-IT World | Seventeen million babies are born each year in China. Yet in 2010, the country only had the capacity to offer 150,000 amniocenteses a year. As the most populous country in the world with a well-established one child policy, that number is astonishingly low. And it represents a ripe market for the next generation of prenatal testing. Now Berry Genomics, co-founded by Daixing Zhou, is hoping to capitalize on the market in China.

    Feb 20, 2013

  • Coriell Life Sciences Launches Gene Vault Service

    Technology Review | Coriell Life Sciences--a startup from a partnership between Coriell Institute for Medical Research and IBM--aims to facilitate genomics in the clinic. The company plans to offer sequencing, data storage in a "gene vault", and data delivery in an electronic medical record.

    Feb 19, 2013

  • DREAM Project and Sage Bionetworks Join Forces

    Bio-IT World | Sage Bionetworks and the DREAM Project— Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods—are merging efforts to run open science computational challenges which foster the broader collaboration of the research community and provide a meaningful impact to both discovery and clinical research.

    Feb 19, 2013

  • The Staffing Contradictions in Biotech

    Xconomy | After layoffs in the 150,000 range from 2009-2012, pharma and biotech are lamenting their lack of qualified workers to grow their businesses.

    Feb 18, 2013

  • Ion Torrent Edges Illumina in Sales Battle of Benchtop Sequencers, Says Macquarie Report

    Bio-IT World | Sales of the Ion Torrent desktop sequencers exceed those of its rival MiSeq machine from Illumina, according to a new report from Macquarie Equities Research, which highlights encouraging trends for both Illumina and Ion Torrent parent company, Life Technologies.

    Feb 18, 2013

  • PeerJ Rolls Out New Open Access Journal, Platform

    Bio-IT World Roundup | This week, PeerJ published its first articles--on sauropod necks, the cups and balls trick, anti-apoptotic signaling in mammalian hibernation and more. The scientific publishing site is more than just an open access publisher. PeerJ has built an innovative platform from scratch.

    Feb 15, 2013

  • AWS Data Warehouse Now Available

    Computerworld | Amazon Web Services has released its cloud-based data warehouse Redshift to all users. Redshift users can provison a single 2TB data warehouse or as a cluster of 16 2TB nodes or 16TB nodes, by default.

    Feb 15, 2013

  • The Genomics Tipping Point

    Wired | Genomics is poised for a "cell phone moment," Wired says--the tipping point where the technology becomes a commodity, hardware is cheap, and software and apps drives the industry.

    Feb 15, 2013