Part of what we're trying to do here at LifeSciSoft is make scientists aware of the software that's out there to help them perform their research more efficiently and effectively, as too often good software goes unnoticed. FreezerPro is a great example. Made by a small company (RURO), FreezerPro is something that many labs have wished to exist, not knowing that it already does! Read More

Agilent, along with researchers from six research organizations, were awarded a $6 million grant from the NIH to advance predictive toxicology. The consortium was provided the grant in order to "map and provide quantitative dose-response models for selected pathways of toxicity" with the goal of establishing a public resource to share the results of toxicology testing. Read More

Omicsoft has published a study in the early advanced access edition of Bioinformatics about their Omisoft Sequence Aligner (OSA), a tool for RNA-Seq alignment. To keep it short and sweet, I'll jump right to the point. Read More

This one flew over our heads for a while, but thanks to a glance through this month's Laboratory Equipment Magazine we just caught up to the news that Advanced Chemistry Development (often known as ACD Labs) released Spectrus Workbooks, the latest addition to their ACD/Spectrus line of software for analytical and chemical knowledge management. Read More

Many of the data geeks in our audience are probably already familiar with this, but there's an ages-old algorithm that's commonly used for data compression - the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT). While it has been around and widely used for 18 years, it never was suitable for genomic or other omic data compression because of BWT's high computing requirements when dealing with large data sets. A team from Illumina Cambridge, however, has modified the BWT for exactly such a purpose and with quite good results. Read More

A recent article in GEN makes the argument that as sequencing costs fall, the informatics costs of analyzing and managing all of that data are actually going to increase on a per-genome basis. Although, as Daniel MacArthur points out in the Genomes Unzipped blog, the argument is based on some wacky assumptions and alarmism over the costs of genomics data analysis are largely unfounded. Read More

Noldus Information Technology, along with three Dutch universities, three other companies, a large food industry and two food research firms, have teamed up on the FOCOM (“Food and Cognition Model systems”) project. The project aims to "develop innovative new technology for the measurement of visual product perception, choice and eating behavior." Read More

At the recommendation of @archivist84, we decided to give a look at SNPCheck from the National Genetics Reference Laboratory at the University of Manchester. As was told to us, SNPCheck is "great for finding those pesky SNPs in your primers." Read More

In New Zealand and in Australia, two genomics software products are up for some fairly prestigious awards in their home countries. Read More

Definiens announced today that it has added the capability to perform automated in situ hybridization analysis to the latest version - version 3.5 - of its Tissue Studio software. Tissue Studio 3.5 will automate the analysis of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), chromogenic in situ hybridization (CISH), silver in situ hybridization (SISH), and dual in situ hybridization (dual-ISH). Read More

If you're into pharmacological modeling and simulation, Simulations Plus has a treat for you. They'll be globetrotting this month, hitting conferences in Asia, Europe, and North America. You can meet the team and get up to speed on the latest in pharmacology software. Catch them at the following conferences: Read More

There was an interesting article the other day in Chemical & Engineering News about how companies with laboratory informatics offerings are developing or swallowing up companies that make popular electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) software. All this activity isn't just out of a simple love for data management, either. Informatics companies such as Accelrys and PerkinElmer are instead plugging the ELNs directly into laboratory information management systems (LIMS), and in turn plugging the LIMS into enterprise-level informatics platforms. Read More

PerkinElmer today announced the launch of its Search Genius application, designed to run on Microsoft SharePoint. Search Genius will enable researchers to "search, save and share unstructured data stored throughout their organization," thereby making knowledge more accessible and increasing productivity. Read More

A few things on our radar for next week in the life science software arena: Read More

If you're tired of protein folding or deciphering the connectome of the retina then perhaps it's time to move on from simple crowdsourced science games to crowdsourced diagnostics games! Well you're in luck... The Ozcan lab at UCLA have developed a game that crowdsources the diagnosis of malaria. Read More

There's a great article in GEN from last Friday that talks about how big "big data" really is, and if it just may be too big. The article discusses the problem of the production of omics data increasing far faster than computing power, how compression is and isn't a solution, and the need for improved algorithms. Read More

BioBase, a provider of curated life science databases, has announced an update to their ExPlain database via their Facebook page. ExPlain 3.1 includes "additional TRANSFAC® positional weight matrices as well as additional PROTEOME™ network relationships and functional assignments." The post also notes that there are new features, although it does not mention what these features are. Read More

Textco BioSoftware today announced the release of version 2.0 of its Gene Inspector ELN / sequence analysis software. Gene Inspector 2.0 includes new algorithms for faster processing, support for the most recent Mac and Windows operating systems, and improved graphics. Read More

In his informatics insights blog, the former LabVantage Vice President of Strategic Services Brian Potter writes that LIMS (laboratory information management systems) and ELNs (electronic laboratory notebooks) may very well be on a crash course. He argues that the audiences that the two were originally meant to serve, once very distinct, are blurring and blending and will eventually become one. Why? The same thing that makes the world go 'round: money. Read More

If you were a fan of 90's crime shows, or perhaps given our audience some of you worked in forensic labs in the 90's, you'll know that identifying someone from their DNA was primarily based on analyzing short tandem repeats. That has long gone to the wayside, however, as with the advent and plunging costs of high-throughput sequencing it rapidly became an inefficient tool. Now, short tandem repeats are about to make a comeback because of a new software tool. Read More

Simulations Plus announced yesterday the release of the newest version of its popular GastroPlus pharmacology software. GastroPlus is used for the simulation of drug absorption, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics in humans and animals. Some of the expanded functionality in GastroPlus 8.0 includes: Read More

IDBS yesterday announced a partnership with Thomson Reuters, aiming to improve how researchers use and access "curated biological content." The partnership will pair IDBS E-WorkBook Suite with the compound information contained in Thomson Reuters Integrity^SM, delivered through the Cortellis Targets API. Read More

Earlier this week, Illumina announced the release of its new BaseSpace Apps applications store for its BaseSpace genomics cloud computing platform. The aim of the new app store is to "allow customers to connect with a growing community of academic, commercial and open source tool providers who are building applications around Illumina data to dramatically simplify and accelerate genomic data analysis." Read More

Definiens will be hosting two additional webinars in its “Quantitative Digital Pathology Made Easy" series of free webinars on quantitative digital pathology: Read More

Geneious has announced the full launch of version 5.6 of Geneious Pro (we covered the release of Geneious 5.6 Beta last month). From the read of the announcement, it seems like there aren't many surprises. The features that Biomatters highlighted in the beta version all made it to the full release. Read More

NextBio, a big data company offering troves of genomic data to its customers via NextBio Research, recently announced that it will is expanding its offering to translational medicine and clinical research through a new product: NextBio Clinical. Read More

ELN Technologies (which you may know better as Rescentris) announced that it will be unveiling a new version of its CERF ELN for iPad this coming week at Bio-IT world. In addition, CERF for iPad has been selected as a finalist for Bio-IT World's "Best in Show" award. Read More

LifeSciSoft will be attending BioIT World next week. Will we be exhibiting? No. Will we be presenting? No. But we will be doing a lot of wandering the halls. In fact, we may even be doing EPIC amounts of wandering the halls! Read More

Nonlinear Dynamics has announces a relatively packed upcoming conference schedule. In addition to conference attendance announced for June and beyond, they will be attending 5 conferences by the end of May. You can see Nonlinear Dynamics and view their line of proteomics and metabolomics software over the next month or so at the following conferences: Read More

Simulations Plus announced today the launch of a new version of ADMET Predictor™, version 6.0. The new version has many new features and improvements. Read More

CLC bio has teamed up with Convey Computer to deliver CLC Genomics Workbench on Convey's hybrid-core servers. Just today, they announced the completion of such a deployment at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research. Read More

Agilent yesterday announced the release of its new GPC/SEC software for gel permeation chromatography and size exclusion chromatography. The new software aims to improve polymer characterization through higher quality results and improved data reporting. Read More

AgileBio yesterday announced the release of its new Protein Tracking System (PTS) add-on for LabCollector LIMS. The new PTS is described by AgileBio as "a network based application for protein production, purification and analysis management" and focuses on quality management for protein production activities. Read More

I don't know what it is about network analysis software that I've been so drawn to recently. I don't work with large, complex data sets anymore and I never found it particularly enjoyable when I did. But perhaps that's because I didn't have some of the incredible software tools that are available to make data look and feel so awesome.

We wrote about a week ago about an open source visualization software called Gephi and raved about how good it looks. It has company.

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There's a lot of omics getting thrown around the life sciences these days, and with any foray into omics comes challenging amounts of data. Data that needs to be analyzed, managed, stored, and in some cases secured. It's tempting to jump into big data type problems, but before you get in over your head, it's good to assess how much will need to be done and if it's really necessary. Read More

PerkinElmer today announced the release of its Ensemble for Biology laboratory informatics platform. PerkinElmer describes their new software offering as "an integrated suite of informatics solutions that focuses on the complex and varied needs of biological research." Read More

RURO today announced the release of a "Basic" version of its FreezerPro 2012 software for sample management. FreezerPro Basic will be a low-cost version of the full FreezerPro package, allowing smaller labs to access the freezer management / sample management features of FreezerPro. Read More

For anyone who might be interested, Eagle Genomics has make publicly available the presentations from its second annual symposium available online via slideshare. The presentations cover a range of topics in genomics and bioinformatics. Read More

Oxford Gene Technology has released a major update to its CytoSure™ Interpret Software for array Comparative Genomic Hybridisation (aCGH) analysis. The new version incorporates a brand new relational database design which "allows sample data to be stored and analysed in accordance to its relationship with other data". the new CytoSure Interpret also incorporates one-click analysis functionality for common, routine analyses. Read More

CLC bio, in an effort to simplify their software offerings, has discontinued three of its products: CLC DNA Workbench, CLC RNA Workbench, and CLC Protein Workbench. The functionality of the three packages was already combined into one software offering, CLC Main Workbench, which will act as their replacement. Read More

Just out of curiosity (okay, there was a bit of an in-house bet as well) we hopped over to HighWire to do a few full-text searches to see what the most referenced genomics software is. We had a few criteria: Read More

CLC bio released a bunch of new software updates today, bundling some improvements and bug fixes in each. CLC Genomics Workbench, CLC Genomics Server, CLC Sequence Viewer, and CLC Main Workbench were all updated. Some of the highlights are below: Read More

We recently came across a free, open-source data visualization program for people who need to work with large, interacting data sets. Still in beta, the software is called Gephi, and boy does it look cool. Read More

Last week, the NIH released the 1000 Genomes Project data on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This data forms "the world's largest set of data on human genetic variation" and is now publicly available. Read More

Eagle Genomics made a fun little periodic table knockoff called "The Elements of Bioinformatics". It groups the tools, similarly to how they're grouped on the periodic table, and denotes the year they were made. Read More

Integromics has launched RealTime StatMiner 4.3, its latest tool for qPCR analysis, on TIBCO Spotfire. The new version allows users of qPCR systems by Applied Biosystems (Life Technologies), Roche, Bio-Rad, Illumina, Qiagen and Fluidigm to "have their data easily processed by a top-level and user-friendly tool". Read More

Definiens has released the program for their 3rd International Symposium, which will be held from June 15th-16th at Ernst & Young Auditorium in Munich, Germany. The symposium is broken down into 5 sequential sessions (two on Friday, three on Saturday). Read More

CLC bio has released the QC Report Plugin version 1.0 for CLC Genomics Workbench and CLC Genomics Server. The new plugin "provides statistics about base distribution, quality, Kmer overrepresentation and duplicated sequences" and verifies sequencing data set quality. Read More

The Pistoia Alliance will be holding its second annual conference at the Thompson Reuters campus in Boston, Massachusetts on April 24th. The conference will showcase projects that Pistoia is undertaking that aim to improve genomic data analysis and data management. Read More

A recent paper in BMC Bioinformatics detailed a research team's new cloud bioinformatics computing platform for genomics. Cloud BioLinux is "a publicly accessible Virtual Machine (VM) that enables scientists to quickly provision on-demand infrastructures for high-performance bioinformatics computing using cloud platforms." Read More

Earlier this week, Geneious announced the launch of version 5.6 of Geneious Pro. Geneious Pro 5.6 has over 25 new features, including: Read More

Sympletic, the developers of Sympletic Elements research management software for academic institutions, will be holding its 4th annual user conference at the Hamilton House in London, UK, on May 21st. Read More

Japanese bioscience distributor Filgen will be distributing Qlucore's Omics Explorer software in Japan, Qlucore announced yesterday. Omics Explorer is data analysis software for genomic, proteomic, and transcriptomic data designed to handle large, multivariate data sets. Read More

Agilent has released version 12.0 of its GeneSpring Software. The new version contains the new "Pathway Architect" module, designed to conduct joint analysis across multiple -omics platforms at the pathway level. Read More

Yesterday, PerkinElmer announced the launch of its Ensemble for Chemistry suite at the ACS meeting. Ensemble for Chemistry is described as a "integrated informatics suite for enhancing chemist productivity and decision-making" across multiple industry segments, including biopharmaceutical and academia. Read More

MacVector has announced via Twitter that they plan to add support for annotating sequences from GFF, BED, GFT, and GFF3 files in their next release. Read More

Biomatters, the developers of Geneious, have released a beta version of a new plugin for Geneious allowing the analysis of microsatellites. The new beta of the microsatellite plugin is being offered as a free trial until the end of May. Read More

In Silico Biology, Inc., has updated its IMC (in silico Molecular Cloning) software to version 5.1.0, with a host of fixes and improvements. Updates in this version include: Read More

Simulations Plus recently announced that they have designed a potential new drug to inhibit the malaria parasite completely digitally. Using only publicly available data along with their MedChem Studio, MedChem Designer , ADMET Predictor , and GastroPlus software, they designed five novel compounds then demonstrated that four of the five would exhibit some inhibition, and one would show "very potent inhibition at a level suitable to be a therapeutic agent". Read More

Pharsight will be holding its 8th annual Pharsight US PKS User Group Meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia, PA, on April 24th and 25th. The meeting is only open to users of Pharsight's PKS enterprise data management system for secure storage and tracking of PK/PD data. The following day, April 26th, at the same venue, Pharsight will host a Pharsight desktop software user group meeting open to users of Pharsight's desktop pharmacology and other drug development software solutions. Read More

Appistry's Vice President of Product Strategy, Sultan Meghji, is interviewed in a podcast on Mendelspod that was released yesterday. In it, he discusses many current issues in genomics, including genomic data analysis, and makes the case that the genomics bottleneck still lies with sequencing, not genomic analysis. He also discusses Appistry's move into the life sciences. Read More

Next week, at the USCAP annual meeting in Vancouver, Definiens software for digital pathology will be highlighted in a series of talks by Definiens users. Read More

While Pittcon has always been associated with instrumentation, there's a lot of new analytical software being released at Pittcon as well! Read More

Simulations Plus has purchased the IP behind the Enslein Metabolism Module from Enslein Research of Rochester, New York. They were previously licensing the technology. Read More

Sage-N Research has partnered with data management company IO Informatics to integrate both of their technologies in what will be a new proteomics research application. Read More

A team of researchers have developed a new algorithm capable of detecting consensus motifs in biological networks. Understanding broadly-applicable network characteristics will allow researchers across all of biology (or at least bioinformaticians) to more successfully predict structural elements of specific networks, as many networks have common motifs. Read More

Brian Klein of Medgadget reported that Andreas Sundquist, CEO and co-founder of DNAnexus, announced at the recent FutureMed conference that DNAnexus plans to release "something akin to an ‘operating system’ for genomics” this year. Read More

Geneious has issued a challenge to create a feature, visualization, or analysis plugin for Geneious Pro. The winner will get a $1000 cash prize, and all entrants will receive a free year of Geneious Pro. The contest is open to submissions until the 25th of June, and the winner will be announced the next month at the the iEvoBio meeting in Ottawa, Canada. Read More

We admittedly caught wind of this one a little bit late, but in case you missed the news as well we wanted to make sure you know that Ensembl has been updated to e66! There's a bunch of updates in this release, including: Read More

Strand Life Sciences released released a patch today which updates version 1.3 of its Avadis NGS software to 1.3.1. According to Strand, the update includes: Read More

So this is a little bit of a diversion from our normal strict adherence to topics about life science software for research use, as this isn't really science and definitely not for research use, but it sure as heck is neat.

So this new company Portable Genomics, is developing software that will allow people to visualize their personal genomic data on their smartphones (presuming they have genomic data and have access to it, of course). If that isn't cool enough as-is, they have this side project called GeneGroove, which is currently up and running and usable. What it does is...

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The lab of Andreas Teufel at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany has recently developed and published RNA-Seq Atlas, a "a web-based repository of RNA-Seq gene expression profiles and query tools". Freely available via the web, the RNA-Seq Atlas is the first database providing researchers with data mining tools and open access to large-scale RNA-seq expression profiles. Read More

X-Gen Congress & Expo will be holding two conferences on genomics data next week at the Hilton San Diego in San Diego, California. The Genomic Data Analysis and Interpretation conference will be held from March 5th - 7th, and the tail end will overlap with the Sequencing Data Storage and Management conference which will be held from March 7th and 8th. Read More

Noldus will be hosting a workshop and user meeting on March 22nd at its headquarters in Wageningen, The Netherlands. This meeting will provide both a meeting of the minds for users to learn from each other as well as provide information on the latest applications and future developments in Noldus products. Read More

Eagle Genomics announced the launch of its second annual bioinformatics survey. The survey is designed to assess the bioinformatics community's opinions about trends and current issues in operational genomics. Read More

Yesterday, Amazon announced the beta release of its Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF), "a workflow service for building scalable, resilient applications."

So what? Well, if you're a bioinformatician your life may be getting significantly easier. Laboratory informatics commonly relies on complex workflows to take data from one system, process it with another system, integrate it with other data, then store it (or something along those lines). Traditionally, tools such as Pipeline Pilot or eHive have provided this functionality, but everything had to be analyzed in-house on standalone machines or by clusters. With Amazon SWF, this is no more.

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Simulations Plus will be holding four workshops on it's popular physiological modeling & simulation software GastroPlus™ in four different cities in the coming months. Read More

BioTeam last week announced the release of MiniLIMS for the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine. It will be available starting March 15th on the Life Technologies Webstore. The PGM version of MiniLIMS will simplify data entry, automatically load PGM data, and provide custom report generation capabilities. Read More

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine and Scripps Research Institute have collaboratively developed and released metaXCMS, software for the meta-analysis of untargeted metabolomic data from multiple profiling experiments. Read More

Med Associates has announced the release of the 64-bit version of their behavioral programming software, Med-PC®. The new version will be released on March 1st, 2012. Read More

Accelrys recently announced details for the Accelrys Tech Summit 3. This free event will be held April 18th and 19th at the Sheraton Brussels Hotel in Brussels, Belgium. Accelrys staff will be hosting over 40 sessions covering Pipeline Pilot, Symyx Notebook, Isentris, and VelQuest. There will also be an optional €350 pre-event training course on Pipeline Pilot and Symyx Notebook that will be held on April 17th, covering the fundamentals of Pipeline Pilot as well as an intermediate-level course on development and customization of Symyx Notebook. Read More

Complete Genomics has announced its Genomic Discovery Software Partners Program, which is to initially include Ingenuity® Systems, Golden Helix and DNAnexus. The goal of the partners program is to enable faster, quality analysis to Complete Genomics customers. Read More

In the latest GeneSpring newsletter, Agilent announced the near-imminent release of GeneSpring 12, which they've dubbed the "Integrated Biology" release. To support "multi-omics" research, GeneSpring 12 will contain cross-omics analysis workflows leveraging network and pathway information. Read More

Labguru, the collaborative research management web application for researchers and academic labs, has teamed up with Nature Publishing Group to bring high-quality protocols direct to Labguru users. This will make it easier for Labguru users to access and use certain protocols, as well as create plans for experiments that use the protocols. Read More

Biochrom recently released its new Resolution software for PC control of its WPA spectrophotometers. Biochrom released four different versions of the software, all operating in Windows (XP, Vista,or 7). Read More

Tired of optimizing protein binding sites playing Foldit? Well now you have another scientific gaming option. You can now help researchers at MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research decipher the connectome (the entirety of neural wiring) of the retina! Read More

Eagle Genomics and Cycle Computing have been selected by the Pistoia Alliance for a four-month project to develop a proof-of-concept system to meet the projected future needs of pharmaceutical research and development IT, specifically for sequence analysis. This collaboration combines the bioinformatics experience of Eagle Genomics with the more general cloud computing expertise of Cycle Computing. Read More

Accelerated Technology Laboratories will be holding one of its bi-annual Sample Master® LIMS Boot Camp hands-on training courses from March 5th to March 9th at the Hampton Inn & Suites Southern Pines in Pinehurst, North Carolina. Read More

Integromics, which makes data analysis and data management solutions for genomics and proteomics, has partnered with the Galician Foundation of Genomic Medicine (FPGMX) to develop inexpensive solutions for clinical genomics. Read More

Interested in learning more about ways to boost your lab productivity through better management of your data, protocols, etc.? Well if you would potentially be interested in Labguru, they're making it easy for you to learn more about it and get a little comfortable with their software before signing up for a free individual membership or getting a lab subscription. Read More

Simulations Plus is on the faculty for the ODD12: Predicting Drug Absorption workshop taking place from February 26th to March 2nd at Harrah's Lake Tahoe in Stateline, NV. They'll be hosting several hands-on sessions using GastroPlus™, ADMET Predictor™ and MedChem Designer™. Read More

Strand Life Sciences today announced the release of version 1.3 of their Avadis NGS data analysis software. Updates to Avadis NGS in this release include... Read More

So we all know that NGS data storage is a HUGE headache, mostly because there's just so much if it. Uncompressed storage rapidly becomes impractical, and compression methods aren't nearly keeping up with demand. This, however, creates opportunity for aspiring data managers and bioinformaticians.

Presently that opportunity comes in the form of a $15,000 prize offered up by The Pistoia Alliance.

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If you've stumbled upon this blog post then you're in luck, because we're giving you up to four chances to win a free one-year subscription to Labguru for you and your lab (up to 5 people). We also have some other neat prizes we're literally giving away. Want more info? You can find it here: http://www.lifescisoft.com/contest Read More

ExPASy, the Bioinformatics Resource Portal providing access to a multitude of databases and software tools, will be down for maintenance from Sunday January 29th to Wednesday February 1st, 2012. Read More

A recent Nature News editorial highlights the ever-increasing use of ELNs - electronic laboratory notebooks - and other laboratory and data management software. With more and more labs going fully digital, they discuss the auspicious lack of paper in many modern laboratories, and the efficiencies created by converting. Read More

If you're looking at the headline of this post and thinking "WTF?!?" then you're thinking roughly the same thing I was when I saw that there is a video game about protein folding. No, you're not hallucinating. Yes, we're completely serious. Read More

BioData has released a free Labguru iPad app! The Labguru iPad app, which syncs with users existing Labguru accounts, is specifically designed for use at the bench. It includes countdown timers, formats protocols for easy reading, a list of current experiments, and other useful features. Read More

Labvantage has released a new version of it's self-titled LIMS software, Labvantage 6. This version of Labvantage improves upon instrument integration and batch management, adds new event-driven functionality, and supports mobile devices. It also further moves away from paper with a fully functional ELN that creates electronic documents from their paper counterparts using Labvantage's eForms technology. Read More

At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco last week, PerkinElmer CEO Rob Friel was presenting the company's four main business units and grouped laboratory services and informatics. He also mentioned that he believes the combination of service and informatics will allow them... Read More

On Monday, AB SCIEX and Indigo BioSystems announced a collaboration in which Indigo would provide its ASCENT™ software to AB SCIEX for inclusion with its mass spectrometry platforms. The new platforms will target clinical markets, including forensics, clinical research, and clinical trials. Additionally, Indigo BioSystems will be adding some additional "new-generation" algorithms to its ASCENT platform. Read More

Ion Torrent is sponsoring a research effort led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to develop open-source software that aims to help doctors understand and meaningfully utilize genomic data from patients. Read More

Are you in a tiny institution or department that doesn't have the resources to super-specialize in niche (but important!) areas such as bioinformatics? Well perhaps you just need to change how you think about bioinformatics.

There's a new article published in Nature Biotechnology written by two researchers at the Sainsbury Laboratory in the UK, chronicling how this 80-person institution met the challenge of dealing with large amounts of data from high-throughput experiments.

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This Thursday, Jan 12, at 12:30 pm EST, Lab Manager magazine is holding a webinar on "next generation" electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs). According to the registration information: Read More

CLC bio and SciEngines have teamed up to give BLAST one heck of a turbo boost. Integrating CLC bio's sequence analysis software with SciEngines' FPGA-based RIVYERA S3-5000 platform for massively parallel computing, their preliminary tests have shown a 188x increase speed compared to a Xeon E5520 core. Read More

This managed to fly under our radar until now, but for anyone in the UK interested in everything related to genomics data (or at least interested to the tune of £160+VAT) Eagle Genomics is having a symposium entitled "The Next 10 Years of Genome Content Management" on Thursday, March 29th, 2012 at the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge, UK Read More

For anyone interested in the management of large-scale life science data, we found a great blog for you to follow. Biomap.org is the brand new blog of Amandeep Sidhu, Ph.D., an experienced bioinformatician, research fellow and systems engineer at Curtin University in Australia, where he is leading the development of a bioinformatics facility. Read More

IBM yesterday announced the acquisition of Green Hat, a cloud computing development platform. Green Hat has been around since 1996, but a large acquirer such as IBM will probably boost its visibility and make its use more common.

So what? Well...

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LifeSciSoft will be periodically conducting interviews or inviting guest blogs from subject matter experts on specific areas of interest related to life science software. In this inaugural interview, we sought to address one of the hottest yet most complex topics in scientific software: laboratory information management systems. LifeSciSoft CEO Carlton Hoyt caught up with LIMS implementation expert Gloria Metrick to ask her a few questions about LIMS:

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Accelrys announced today that it is buying software developer VelQuest for $35 million in cash. Accelrys's software offerings previously focused on research & development software, but this purchase extends them into the QA/QC arena. Read More

A research team at the Gene Center and Center for Integrated Protein Science Munich at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Germany have developed a new, open-source, online software tool for protein sequence alignment. Termed HHblits, it enables "lightning-fast" iterative protein sequence searching leveraging hidden Markov models (HMMs). Read More

Laboratory Equipment magazine recently published it's end-of-year survey and while a lot of the results are similar year-over-year, there were some very interesting findings that are very telling about the laboratory software industry. Read More

An article in Forbes recently stated that 2011 should go down in history as "the year of the cloud" and that in 2012 cloud will "just be the way we do things". I'm not so sure that in the average life science laboratory things are quite there yet, and they certainly aren't in the average American household, but for those that are a bit ahead of the technology curve, it's clear that things are rapidly moving in that direction. Let's take a quick look at how the industry has moved into the cloud... Read More

AgileBio releases version 2.1 of its LabCollector electronic laboratory notebook. Read More

Gene Logic files for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ocmium Biosolutions seeks bidders. Read More

BioData Launches Labguru, a Collaborative Research Management Web Application for Academic Labs. Read More

Today marks the launch of LifeSciSoft (http://www.lifescisoft.com), the largest and most comprehensive source of information on software used in life science research. LifeSciSoft has compiled information on well over 600 different software packages, and aims to be a truly comprehensive directory of life science software information. Read More