All our podcasts are recorded and edited for clarity and to make for a more focused package aimed at the average listener. Every once in a while we end up with material that we think might interest those with a deeper interest in the science and this is one of those occasions.   A few days ago, we posted an interview with Quaid Morris about deep learning and how it can be applied to the…

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Time for a science word. 'Phylogeny' refers to the evolutionary or developmental history of a genetically related group or species. In the case of the SARS-CoV-2 virus this mean studying where it came from, how it has evolved and spread, and what that might tell us about how the future of the virus.   Quaid Morris recently received funding through CIFAR’s AI and COVID-19 Catalyst Grants initiative to use artificial intelligence to understand the biology…

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When young boys and girls are in elementary school their interest in the STEM subjects is generally at the same level, but by the time they are in their teens the girls tend to drop out of science activities. The gap is even bigger when you look at university statistics, and when you scroll through the executive ranks in biotech companies  women remain under-represented.   Women in BIO (WIB) was established in 2002 to bring…

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One of the key features for people attending the annual BIO Convention are the one-on-one partnering sessions. When the pandemic derailed plans for the annual event in San Diego, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization decided to make it a fully digital experience, including those one-on-one meetings designed to bring innovators, biotech investors, and companies together.   Quebec-based Raspberry Scientific first attended BIO in Philadelphia last year and the company’s Chief Marketing Officer Vincent Blouin was preparing…

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Instead of 15,000 or so people gathering in San Diego for the Biotechnology Innovation Organization’s annual conference, the pandemic forced the event online. An in-person BIO event features a host of displays, company presentations, plenary sessions, ‘fireside chats’, and the popular one-on-one partnering sessions. How do you take that experience and move it online without it feeling like just another video conference added to your day?   I have been able to log on and…

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If you have ever tried building one of those “easy to assemble” desks with your bare hands, you know that the right tool for the right job makes all the difference. This is especially true when the task is selecting the best cattle for beef or dairy production. “Tools for efficient whole-genome sequence association and prediction analyses” seeks to empower industry in the selection process by putting the “easy” back into “easy to assemble”. “I…

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A few months I had a hotel and flight booked for San Diego to attend the annual BIO conference and exhibition this week. COVID-19 changed that, and in short order the Biotechnology Innovation Organization moved online and on Monday launched BIO Digital. I have been attending some of the sessions, but with research becoming important right now have had limited time to follow-up with our usual collection of BIORadio podcasts and blog posts, but I…

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Guest post by Patrick Wu a Life Science Marketing Consultant based in Alberta.    Normally at this point in the year, students around the world would be hard at work in the lab, getting ready for the iGEM competition. Teams competing at this synthetic biology event are trying to find ways to engineer biology to solve real-life problems. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic has made this year anything but “normal.” Most universities, schools, and labs…

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Bioinformatics makes it possible to analyze large amounts of data from a variety of sources. In one notable use case, it enables the augmentation of contact tracing data with genomics data to create more detail mapping of COVID-19 spread. The disease is caused by the novel coronavirus, also known as SARS-CoV-2. By any name it is the biological threat that brought the world to a standstill and now endangers efforts for a restart.   Humankind…

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  Artificial intelligence is at work in many of the COVID-19 research efforts taking place around the world. The Canadian-based charitable organization CIFAR recently funded 14 new projects that would include machine learning research and application to address the COVID-19 outbreak.   Bogdan Mazoure and Guillaume Rabusseau are researchers with Mila, an artificial intelligence research institute based in Quebec. They received CIFAR and Genome Canada funding to lead a project which will use AI to…

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