Sorghum Sequence Donated To Public Domain
Orion Genomics provides sequence to help researchers improve other grains and develop new fuels.
Compiled by staff
Published: Jan 5, 2005
To help researchers improve crops and contribute to the development of biofuels, Orion Genomics, is donating to public researchers all of its proprietary gene-enriched DNA sequence from the sorghum plant, a close relative of corn and one of the most important cereal crops worldwide.
The sequence is expected to help researchers understand and harness sorghum's unusual resilience in sub-optimal environments to improve other crops such as maize. A paper authored by Orion researchers describes the way in which Orion's GeneThresher technology was used to quickly and cost effectively elucidate for the first time more than 95% of the genes in sorghum.
Previously, using traditional technologies, the sorghum sequence was too large to be cost-effectively determined. The sorghum sequence is available at Genbank (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank) of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"Orion's public release of more than half a million sequences derived from the gene-rich portion of the sorghum genome represents a significant advance in U.S. cereal genome research," says John Mullet, Ph.D., Director of the Crop Biotechnology Center and Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Texas A&M University and a worldwide expert in sorghum research.
"Orion's collection of a half million gene rich sequences and the more than 20,000 different gene sequences derived from NSF funded cDNA sequencing projects provide the first in-depth look at sorghum's gene complement," Mullet says. "This information will significantly advance comparative analysis of the sorghum, rice and maize genomes and accelerate the discovery of genes that contribute to sorghum's unusual adaptation to hot, dry, adverse environments."
The sorghum sequence was developed using Orion's GeneThresher technologies as part of a project that leveraged a 2001 cost share grant awarded to enhance sorghum by the Department of Energy. The grant was awarded to an Orion-led consortium of researchers from NC+ Hybrids and Solvigen, LLC to develop new enhanced sorghum lines with higher starch more efficient in the production of biofuels and bioproducts.
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Tagged: sorghum, biofuels
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