Day: February 2, 2005

Just read a great article on wired.com about Microarrays (silicon chips that light up to reveal which genes are active in a DNA sequence). These chips produce huge volumes of information that scientists have found extremely difficult to process and interpret. Enter the helping hand of s/w company Salk Institute. Top code chairman, Jack Hughes, is a paraplegic who also works as director of the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation researching cures for ameliorating spinal cord damage. Top coder is making a search tool in the form of the Gene Chip Data Interface available to all researchers in this field This should enable scientists to better understand the genetic effects of spinal chord damage in particular and microarray data in general.