AL | SCIENCE NEWS
Metrohm USA Announces 2015 Young Chemist Award Winner
Metrohm USA (Riverview, Fla.) and Metrohm Canada (Mississauga, Ont.) have announced that the winner of the 2015 Young Chemist Award is Chad Atkins. Mr. Atkins is completing his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia where he works under the supervision of Robin Turner and Michael Blades. His research uses Raman spectroscopy to assess the degradation of stored red blood cells to measure age-related changes in stored cell breakdown.
This is the third year Metrohm USA and Metrohm Canada have awarded the $10,000 Young Chemist Award, continuing their philanthropic support and commitment to the advancement of science. The Young Chemist Award is open to all graduate, post graduate and doctorate students residing and studying in the U.S. and Canada who are performing novel research in the fields of titration, ion chromatography, spectroscopy and electrochemistry.
Allele Frequency Community Offers Extensive, Ethnically Diverse Collection
A coalition of 13 leading life science and diagnostics organizations have announced the formation of the Allele Frequency Community, a landmark initiative that is creating an extensive, high-quality and ethnically diverse collection of human genomes to address a key challenge in interpreting sequencing data for research and clinical applications. The announcement coincided with the start of the 16th annual Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) scientific meeting in Marco Island, Florida.
Te Allele Frequency Community was formed aſter the 13 organizations agreed to pool their extensive human exome- and genome-wide variant call datasets in a secure, anonymized, pooled fashion to create the most ethnically diverse, freely accessible, hosted community database of allele frequencies available. Until now, labs oſten collected their own, private allele frequency libraries, but did not have the infrastructure and incentives to integrate their resources into a freely available community asset.
Increasing participation in this community-based resource is expected to create greater value over time. In particular, the Allele Frequency Community has the potential to create increasing value for life sciences and clinical research since information on observed allele frequencies can create important benchmarks that significantly increase the accuracy of findings from data generated by molecular analyses, such as next- generation sequencing (NGS).
To enable this resource to grow, users have the opportunity to opt in to join the Allele Frequency Community and benefit from the extensive database, agreeing in return to contribute statistics from their sequences to the database. Only anonymous, pooled allele frequencies are provided, protecting patient privacy.
The Allele Frequency Community database already holds more than 70,000 variant call datasets including 8000 whole genomes, and has been shown in internal benchmarking studies to generate a 43% average reduction in false positive rates in causal variant identification.
QIAGEN N.V. is one of the founding collaborators of the Allele Frequency Community, and is providing bioinformatics infrastructure
and software for the development of this community-based resource. The data of the Allele Frequency Community is stored on QIAGEN’s secure, HIPAA and Safe Harbor compliant IT infrastructure and made available for free to registered community members. Researchers can initially explore the data using QIAGEN’s Ingenuity Variant Analysis.
New X-Ray Microscope for Nanoscale Imaging
The National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) at Brookhaven National Laboratory delivers a suite of unprecedented X-ray imaging capabilities for the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe (HXN) beamline and brings researchers one step closer to the ultimate goal of nanometer resolution at NSLS-II, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility. The microscope manipulates novel nanofocusing optics called multilayer Laue lenses (MLL)—extremely precise lenses grown one atomic layer at a time—which produce a tiny X-ray beam that is currently about 10 nm in size. Focusing an X-ray beam to that level means being able to see the structures on that length scale, whether they are proteins in a biological sample or the inner workings of a fuel-cell catalyst.
The microscope produces X-ray images by scanning a sample while collecting various X-ray signals emerging from the sample. Analysis of these signals helps researchers understand crucial information about the materials they are examining: density, elemental composition, chemical state and the crystalline structure of the sample. The scientists who built this microscope are working toward making the focused X-ray beam spot even smaller in the future.
“This instrument incorporates most recent developments in inter- ferometric sensing, nanoscale motion and position control. Recorded drifts of two nanometers per hour…set a new benchmark for X-ray microscopy systems,” said Evgeny Nazaretski, a physicist at NSLS-II who spearheaded the development of the microscope.
“Tis instrument is a critical link connecting NSLS-II’s bright X-rays to unprecedented nanoscale X-ray imaging capabilities, which we believe will lead to many groundbreaking scientific discoveries,” stressed Yong Chu, the Group Leader of the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe Beamline at NSLS-II. Te HXN beamline and the HXN X-ray microscope are currently being commissioned and will be available for user experiments later this year.
MIT Physicist Named President of Science Philanthropy Alliance
The Science Philanthropy Alliance, a coalition of nonprofit institutions and foundations dedicated to increasing investment in basic science research, has announced that physicist Marc Kastner, the Donner Professor of Science at MIT, will serve as its first president. Kastner, a member of the faculty since 1973, served from 2007 to 2013 as dean of the School of Science. As president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, he will lead the organization’s efforts to promote philanthropic giving and investment in pioneering science research critical to our long-term economic growth and quality of life.
The Science Philanthropy Alliance seeks to increase philanthropic giving for basic science by $1 billion annually within five years.
AMERICAN LABORATORY • 5 • MARCH 2015
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