Genomics grab

Illumina, the gene-chip maker based in San Diego, says that it will pay $600 million to acquire Solexa, a manufacturer of gene-sequencing machines. The merger, expected to be complete by 31 March next year, will create the first company with technologies in large-scale genotyping, gene expression and gene sequencing — the main tools for exploiting information from the human genome. The move caps a year of significant gains for Illumina (see Nature 444, 256–257; 2006), which says it will retain Solexa's current operations in Hayward, California, and Cambridge, UK.

Supercontracting

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) says it is granting almost $500 million to IBM and Cray to press ahead with the development of supercomputers. The contracts place strong emphasis on making sure that it will be easy to write applications software that will actually make use of computers' vast processing power. DARPA says the computers will deliver performance of more than a petaflop, or 1015 floating-point operations per second.

Merger mania

Mergers and acquisitions of biotechnology companies soared in the second half of 2006, according to a report by Sanford C. Bernstein, an investment research and management firm based in New York. Since July, biotech firms have merged with — or, more frequently, been acquired by — other biotech or drug companies in nine deals worth $24.3 billion. That compares with $15 billion in similar deals in the whole of 2005, and $2.9 billion in the first half of this calendar year. “We're in record territory in terms of both numbers and value of these mergers,” says report author Geoffrey Porges.