TGIF biotechies. Hope you enjoy today’s roundup before you head off for the weekend:

(CANADIAN) NATIONAL BIOTECHNOLOGY WEEK – Today kicks off National Biotechnology Week in Canada. Our neighbors to the north will be participating in events across the country showcasing the companies that are helping drive Canada’s economy and developing new ways to heal, feed and fuel their population. From the website:

Join an annual celebration of the imagination and innovation of Canadian scientists and entrepreneurs from Vancouver to St. John’s. In every region of the country, over 4000 participants will take part in career fairs, meet leading Canadian biotech companies, and see how biotechnology is vital to our economy; and to our future.

You can participate from afar by following the event on Twitter

COST OF SEQUENCING A HUMAN GENOME GenomeWeb reports on the lack of consistency on the claimed costs for sequencing a human genome, even using the same platform.

Users and vendors of second-generation sequencing technologies — including those from Illumina, Applied Biosystems, and Helicos BioSciences — have made various claims over the last few months about how much — or how little — it costs to sequence a human genome on their respective platform.

But even for a single platform, there seems to be no consent on the current cost of sequencing a human genome. Several users of the Illumina Genome Analyzer — arguably the platform used for most human genome sequencing today — interviewed by In Sequence offered different cost estimates, ranging from less than $40,000 to more than $200,000 per genome. Opinions also differed on what should or should not be included in that cost.

Meanwhile, Illumina itself is offering human genome sequencing at different price points…

INDUSTRIAL BIOTECH – MORE THAN JUST GREEN FUEL IN A DIRTY ECONOMY – World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released a report “Exploring the transformational potential of industrial
biotechnology on the way to a green economy”. From the report:

Until now, most efforts to solve the climate crisis have focused on how to reduce the carbon footprint of our current economic system. However, this approach will not alone lead us onto the right path as it is concerned with eliminating a problem rather than building a new economy…Creating a new economy seems an overwhelming task to most of us and obviously no one knows how a future sustainable economy will look like. However, if we have the courage to rise to this challenge and alter our perspective we will see that certain technologies and sectors have an often overlooked potential to help us take the important steps on the path toward sustainability.

Industrial biotechnology is one such sector. Even though the sector is still in it’s infancy, it globally avoids the creation of 33 million tonnes of CO2 each year through various applications, without taking ethanol use into consideration, whilst globally emitting 2 million tonnes of CO2.

With this report, WWF sets out to explore the magnitude and nature of this sector in our search for pathways toward a green economy and a sustainable future.

VENTER & COLLINS TO RECEIVE NATIONAL MEDAL OF SCIENCE – The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Francis Collins and Craig Venter, who led rival efforts to sequence the human genome, have both been awarded the National Medals of Science.