BOL: January 2015

Linux operating system aimed at scientists

Pranjali Yadav — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 08:30:49 -0600

The Bio-Linux operating system is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), and the previous version was using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The developers only use LTS releases and that means that upgrades for this distro don't come along all that often.

This Linux distribution is aimed at scientists and it comes with more than 250 bioinformatics packages, 50 graphical applications and several hundred command line tools. And this is just skimming the surface of what the OS can do. Users have access to even more apps from the official repositories.

Bio-Linux is using an Ubuntu LTS version as its base

The fact that it uses Ubuntu LTS versions for the base is a good thing because it means its users won't have to worry about the support. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is supported until 2019, so people who are using Bio-Linux shouldn't have a problem.

"An updated Bio-Linux 8 version is now on the website in ISO and OVA versions. As usual, there is no need to download this version if you are an existing user. All updates to existing packages will be applied to your system through the update manager and new packages are all available via apt-get or Synaptic," reads the announcement.

The changelog also states that a problem that was preventing the desktop to not start on VirtualBox has been fixed, the QIIME and Bowtie-Bio tools have been upgraded, the pandaseq paired end assembler has been added, and the beginners tutorial specific to Bio-Linux 8 has been improved.

Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and updates. You can download Bio-Linux 8.0.5 right now from Softpedia and give it a spin. It has the Unity desktop and now it runs very well in virtual environments.

Reference @ http://news.softpedia.com/news/Bioinformatics-Distro-Bio-Linux-8-0-5-Now-Available-for-Download-469867.shtml

Interactive Market Intelligence

Pranjali Yadav — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 08:20:38 -0600

BioInformatics LLC, a premier research and advisory firm serving the life science industry, has launched groundbreaking, dynamic-data presentation platform, Interactive Market Intelligence— the only cloud-based market research analytics tool for the life science tools industry.

Superior to traditional PDF and PowerPoint reports, Interactive Market Intelligence allows end-users to filter, create and export literally thousands of views of data — all easily obtainable from a set of core metrics that include market, brand, customer and workflow analytics in well-defined segments of the life science market.

The Market for Real-Time PCR is the first in a series of topics to be explored using the Interactive Market Intelligence platform. The primary research analysis is based on a survey of 900+ international scientists performing qPCR in their laboratories.

Key data findings from "The Market for Real-Time PCR": Global market for qPCR in 2015 is estimated to be $3.6B; The average growth in qPCR throughput is expected to be at 9.8% in 2015; 22% of respondents are highly likely to switch primary suppliers of qPCR products; 50% of respondents use pre-designed primer/probe sets.

WuXi has acquired NextCODE Health

Pranjali Yadav — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 08:17:35 -0600

Shanghai, China-headquartered pharmatech company WuXi (NYSE: WX) has acquired NextCODE Health, a genomic analysis and bioinformatics company based in the USA.

The acquisition was made for $65 million in cash, and WuXi plans to merge its genome center with NextCODE Health to form a new company, WuXi NextCODE Genomics. The business will be headquartered in Shanghai and have operations in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Reykjavik, Iceland.

With the huge unmet medical needs in diseases with a genetic component and the rapid advances in genomics and bioinformatics, now is the right time for WuXi to make a strategic investment in this field, and NextCODE is the right partner. This new venture of WuXi NextCODE Genomics will create important new genomic and bioinformatic products and services to help make personalized treatment and medicine a reality. It will also enable doctors to provide better treatments to patients.