Peter Rice Software Development GeneDoc Analysis and Visualization of Genetic Variation

Summertime again ! Well what passes for summer in Ireland, where they refer to 24 hours of constant drizzling rain as "a grand soft day" and have a hopelessly optimistic view of the weather. It turns out that the editorial team was not being hopelessly optimistic when it promised to deliver volume 4.2 of embnet.news within a month of the last, late, issue. We have recently heard that GCG, which for the last several years has provided the de facto global standard for bioinformatic software, has been bought up by or merged with Oxford Molecular. We hope and expect that this rather radical change will generally be a good thing for molecular biologists and bioinformaticians everywhere. On the commercial front we also note the launch of bio1nf0rm a fortnightly newsletter that aims to deliver, for a price, current information about the world of bioinformatics.