DOE JGI early tester of 454's benchtop sequencer on Y!Finance

454 Life Sciences, a Roche Company (SWX:RO) (SWX:ROG), announced today at the Association of Molecular Pathology Annual Meeting in Kissimmee, Florida a series of revolutionary developments which significantly expand the company’s high-throughput sequencing portfolio. Addressing the growing demand for next-generation sequencing data in everyday biological and clinical research, the company revealed the new GS Junior System, an affordable bench top sequencing platform slated for release in 2010.

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DOE JGI early tester of 454's benchtop sequencer on PharmaLive

The company announced plans to initiate an early access program for development of the next set of performance improvements to the Genome Sequencer FLX System, which will double the read length of the current GS FLX Titanium Kits and expect to contain reads up to 1,000 bp. The DOE Joint Genome Institute will be the first site to begin early access later this month and will use the long-read chemistries to sequence a variety of large, complex genomes. Additional early access partners are expected to be announced in the near future.

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Jonathan Eisen, GEBA project in Nature

"The broad brush strokes of microbial diversity are not adequately represented in that first thousand," says Stephen Giovannoni, a microbiologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. "It's absolutely important that we sequence more."

Enter the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea, a project spearheaded by the US Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek, California, which aims to sequence the genomes of another thousand or so microbes.

The vast majority of microbial species that have had their genomes decoded come from just three groups and were chosen because of their medical or environmental importance. The encyclopedia's researchers are picking microbes from many more branches of the evolutionary tree of life.

More at NatureNews.

Archael transcriptome map on GenomeWeb

In a collaboration between scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Joint BioEnergy Institute, and the Joint Genome Institute, they have constructed a single-base resolution transcriptome map of Sulfolobus solfataricus P2, a well-studied model archaeal organism.

More at GenomeWeb.

Cassava research on InSequence

Recently, UA researchers won a $1.3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to lead an international consortium that is developing a genome variation database for cassava that aims to provide breeding tools to farmers for improving the plant and its disease resistance.

The genome of the cassava, or Manihot esculenta, was sequenced in two stages: In a pilot project under JGI's Community Sequencing Program that was proposed in 2006, JGI researchers generated just under 1-fold coverage of the genome from more than 700,000 Sanger shotgun reads, using plasmid and fosmid libraries, according to Phytozome, a joint resource by JGI and the Center for Integrative Genomics at the University of California, Berkeley.

More at InSequence.

Cassava research on The Medical News

In response to the urgency of this threat, and building upon the newly available cassava genome sequence, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $1.3 million grant to University of Arizona researchers who will lead an international consortium to develop a genome variation database that will provide breeding tools to aid farmers in improving cassava, with a special focus on increased resistance to the CBSD virus.

Steve Rounsley, PhD, associate professor in the School of Plant Sciences at the UA and a member of the BIO5 Institute, will coordinate the project that includes partners at the Institute for Genome Sciences, University of Maryland, Baltimore, the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), and 454 Life Sciences, a Roche Company.

More on News-Medical.Net.

Cassava research on Checkbiotech

A $1.3 Million grant from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will fund the next phase of research that is critical to global food security.

A team of academic, government and industry researchers has completed a first draft of the cassava (Manihot esculenta) genome. The project is an important first step in accelerating the pace of research on this subsistence crop and addressing some of the many limitations that face cassava farmers around the world.

More at Checkbiotech.