Barely a week goes by when an overseas business expert isn't out here telling Australian companies how it should be done. [ + ]

Plant genetics is a driving force in agricultural biotech in Australia, affecting the commercial crop industries, horticulture, forestry and viticulture. Even livestock industries have plant biotechnology programs to develop improved pasture crops. [ + ]

Calls for the government to initiate further commercialisation programs were premature, according to Commonwealth industry body Biotechnology Australia. [ + ]

A debate is emerging over where to draw the line on use of basic research funding sparked by the wholesale push towards commercialisation of Australian research. [ + ]

Described as the biggest advance in microscopy since the electron microscope, the second-generation scanning Kelvin probe has been unveiled by Australian scientists [ + ]

Pilots, not planes, are needed to get Australia's nascent bioinformatics industry off the ground, according to one of the authors of a new report. [ + ]

Like most of us, IT managers at major retailing or banking companies probably find the current revolution in life sciences research compelling because of its promise to disarm hereditary diseases or cancers. But they may not realise that they also have a professional self-interest in computationally driven work on genetics, proteins, and pharmaceuticals. [ + ]

Like a gold-plated corkscrew, bioinformatics is all about unplugging the data bottleneck that clogs drug R&D pipelines. [ + ]

IDG spoke with Dr Caroline Kovac, general manager of IBM Life Sciences Solutions, about her company's involvement in the life sciences. [ + ]

In the biggest party the science community has ever seen, Australia was a wallflower. [ + ]

For an industry that's touted as the way forward for Australia's economy, there can be a surprising lack of clarity or consistency of views about the biotech sector's prognosis. [ + ]

Queensland's biotech employment outlook is bright courtesy of a State government committed to pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into bioindustry over 10 years. [ + ]

Biotech newcomers have been a rare event on the Australian bourse in the past six months. [ + ]

One of the extraordinary aspects of the Bio-IT market is the notion of "scale": the scale of scientific discovery, and the possibilities derived from discovery; the scale of growth, which requires looking at multiple dimensions such as the number of biotech companies, VC investments, IT infrastructure build-out, etcetera; and the scale of complexity, by which I mean the elaborate organisational ecosystems emerging in this market. [ + ]

Hsinchu is not just any Taiwanese city, however. For many years, this island of 22 million people has thrived as a manufacturing base for computing hardware, and Hsinchu, with its massive semiconductor factories, has been its high-tech heart. [ + ]