Here’s your daily dose of biotech news for Tuesday.

ICELAND BIOTECH REGAINS FOOTING DESPITE COLLAPSING ECONOMY – News out of Iceland hasn’t been too hot lately (no pun intended). The economy there has been hit the hardest of any in this recession, culminating in a collapse of many of the nation’s largest banks last year. And to make matters worse, last week the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development predicted that jobless rates would continue to increase. Despite all of this, deCODE Genetics, a biotechnology company based in Reykjavik, Iceland, has begun to recover from the chaos, today announcing it would be re-listed on the NASDAQ Global Market stock exchange after being bumped from it in February. Even in the worst example of a down economy, the biotech industry has the capacity to succeed. Nature.com reports:

deCODE is famous for its aggressive pursuit of DNA sequence variations linked to human disease, and aims to use this information to develop diagnostic tools and uncover new drug targets. Last October, its steadily declining stock price combined with a crashing market to drive the company’s market capitalization (a measure of a company’s worth, based on share price) below the $50 million minimum required to be listed on the NASDAQ Global Market stock exchange. [...] But the company has lived on (and continued to crank out high profile genome-wide association studies).

WISCONSIN JOINS OTHER STATES IN MAKING BIOTECH A PRIORITY IN ECONOMIC RECOVERY – A major part of the Governor’s new budget includes an initiative with the purpose of increasing R&D activities and biotechnology research in the state. In addition to calling for sales and use tax exemptions for manufacturing and biotechnology and creating an income tax credit for increasing research and development, the budget provides $8.2 million to support biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technologies research at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. The budget, aimed at stimulating growth, investment, and economic recovery, follows a number of other states who also see the gain in fostering biotech innovation in their states.

JGI ANNOUNCES 2010 COMMUNITY SEQUENCING PROJECTS – The US Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute announced that it will support 71 new sequencing projects to advance its bio-energy and climate research programs. The programs will involve whole-genome sequencing, single cell sequencing, resequencing of bacteria, and metagenomics of microbial communities, JGI said. GenomeWeb reports:

“The information we generate from these projects promises to improve the clean, renewable energy pathways being developed now as well as lend researchers more insight into the global carbon cycle, options for bioremediation, and biogeochemical processes,” DOE JGI Director Eddy Rubin said in a statement today.

“In translating DNA sequence data into biology, we generate valuable science that improves our understanding of the complex processes that support life on the planet, or imperil it,” Rubin added.

STUDY HIGHLIGHTS AUTISM’S GENETIC COMPLEXITY – A new study comparing genetic samples of autistic and normal children has identified 27 different genetic regions where missing or extra copies of DNA segments may interfere with gene function and impair neurological development. The study was published in the latest issue of PloS Genetics. Modern Medicine reports:

Maja Bucan, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, and colleagues compared genetic samples of 3,832 individuals from 912 families with children with autism spectrum disorders from the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange with genetic samples from a control group of 1,070 children without autism.

The researchers found 27 different genetic regions with rare copy number variations (missing or extra copies of DNA segments) in the genes of children with autism, but not in the control group. The researchers also identified two previously unreported genes with variations, BZRAP1 and MDGA2, which are thought to regulate synaptic function and neurological development, respectively. The researchers note that the findings again highlight the large number of genes that apparently are involved in the development of autism.