Richard Simpson came home from the second annual meeting of the Human Proteome Organisation in Montreal last month as the organisation's vice-president. But Simpson, of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Melbourne, has too much on his mind to be too carried away by the esteem of the role. [ + ]

Sydney start-up Fluorotechnics has signed a deal under which multinational Amersham Biosciences will exclusively supply and distribute its Deep Purple protein stain worldwide. [ + ]

Doing proteomics is expensive, relying on a suite of new and traditional technology with hefty price tags -- sample prep, mass specs, gel spot cutters, electrophoresis, and substantial IT hardware. [ + ]

In applications as diverse as dairy, brewing and molecular microbiology, drinking water analysis and pharmaceutical research, clinical waste disposal and sewage treatment, sterility is the key word in good laboratory practice

Due to the presence of residual acidic silanol groups in most commercial packings, secondary chromatographic effects are common and are usually troublesome. As a result, efficiency and peak shape for some analytes are usually unacceptable at neutral pH

In what Francis Collins has termed "an unprecedented offer," the US NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute has offered to share the cost of generating the sequence of the tammar wallaby genome despite going ahead with an American opossum species as the chosen marsupial for comparative genomics. [ + ]

Growing interest in grid computing technologies will drive its rapid advancement as the technology grows from research darling to commercial reality, IBM's senior grid computing strategist, Rob Vrablik, predicted during a recent visit to Sydney. [ + ]

Retinal stem cells could well be the first neural stem cells used in patients, University of Toronto researcher Derek van der Kooy predicted recently at the National Stem Cell Centre conference in Melbourne. [ + ]

University of Queensland scientist Assoc Prof Victor Nurcombe has moved to Singapore to continue his work on repairing bone fractures using sugars from the surface of cells. [ + ]

In his closing comments to the National Stem Cell Centre conference in Melbourne earlier this month, Monash University's Martin Pera gave voice to a thought many of the scientists at the conference had been contemplating over the previous couple of days. "What is in front of us is of the scale of the Human Genome Project, if not larger," Pera told delegates. "In the last five years the ethical frameworks have been established. But we have to continue the ethical debate." [ + ]

Melissa Trudinger asks industry insiders where the next big investment opportunities will come from -- and identifies a few other likely chances. [ + ]

The thing about bioinformatics, according to Prof Terry Speed, is that it tends to attract people from a variety of disciplines, such as physicists with programming skills not interested in a career in defence, or mathematicians with a practical bent. [ + ]

In the past, the majority of pumps used in the chemical laboratory were water-jet pumps and oil-sealed rotary vane pumps. About 10 years ago, these systems were nearly completely replaced by systems using diaphragm pumps

The merger of molecular spectroscopy with microscopy is not a new concept. Microscope attachments for FT-IR spectrometers have been available for nearly two decades and there are literally thousands of FT-IR spectrometers with these devices installed

With the help of biotechnology the race is on to discover the magic bug that will revolutionise the mining industry. Julian Cribb reports