Wellcome Light Bills, ASMS Hype

On Slashdot, the IT news virtual mosh pit, the techno geeks today deconstruct the light bills at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, one of the world's leading life-sciences institutions. A temporary swerve in the coversation drives by the idea that the Sanger's data will be privately held is corrected by a link provided by someone who writes that they are a member of the institute. This is a useful conversation that analyzes the Institute's use of electricity, and its use of alpha servers to crunch the data. By the way, the center has some 2,000 processors online. Compare that to the 8,000 processors planned for IBM's Big Blue Brain.

The annual meeting of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry is producing a stream of press releases on new products for life-sciences applications. Mass spectrometry, while a fairly well developed technology for analysis, still requires much more work to fulfill its promise in molecular biology.

The ASMS meeting and the annual Pittsburgh Conference are the two most visible trade shows for the mass spectrometry industry. ASMS is regarded as the key show for life sciences applications and it is there that vendors tend to introduce new products for that market. NBE took a quick walk through releases coming from the vendors. Here are some of the new products rolled out:

PerkinElmer's state-of-the-art BioXPRESSION Biomarker platform provides a complete solution that can speed the discovery of biomarkers through its unique biomarker sample enrichment technology and highly accurate mass pattern recognition approach. Hype check: Can speed the discovery.

Thermo Electron introduces breakthrough mass spectrometry technology. Hype check: Breakthrough?

Bruker Daltonics announces Proteineer-LC 1.1, a unique LC-MS/MS-based quantitative proteomics solution. Hype check: Unique?