HERCULES, Calif., June 21, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), USDA issued a $100,000 award for the development of Bovine Parentage Genotyping by Highly Multiplex Next Generation Sequencing.
This project is related to a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between Eureka Genomics and the Agricultural Research Service, USDA to develop a low cost, low-density marker assay (LDMA) focused on the bovine industry. The core technology for low cost high-throughput genotyping will have applications across animal, plant and clinical markets.
"The collaboration has resulted in a very cost-effective, high-throughput approach to single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping, which is currently available for bovine parentage testing as well as for custom applications. Continuing development efforts are focused on increasing the number of SNPs that can be included in an assay, on further reducing the costs of adding SNP to assays, and on expanding the approach to include additional types of polymorphisms," said Mark Thallman, Ph.D. Research Geneticist and co-inventor of the technology, at the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center.
"The success of and knowledge created during the collaboration between Eureka Genomics and the USDA on LDMA for high-throughput genotyping is being leveraged into an ongoing collaboration between Eureka Genomics and the USDA that has expanded to include many diverse areas including 16S characterization and improved sample handling for next generation sequencing. Eureka Genomics is very pleased to continue to work with the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center to improve the applications of high throughput sequence data in the agricultural setting," said Heather Koshinsky, PhD., CSO, Eureka Genomics.
About Eureka Genomics: EG is a leader in advanced bioinformatics analysis of next-generation sequencing data, which it applies to the discovery of microorganisms associated with cancers and other life threatening diseases, the development of molecular diagnostics, and low density soluble assays. EG leverages its proprietary algorithms and biological problem-solving expertise and provides collaborative, cost-effective high quality sequencing and analysis services to a broad range of university, government and industry researchers worldwide. www.eurekagenomics.com. For more information, please contact Didier Perez, 415-269-0666. didier@eurekagenomics.com.
About the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center. Scientists at the Roman L. Hruska U.S. Meat Animal Research Center (MARC) are developing scientific information and new technology to solve high priority problems for the U.S. beef, sheep, and swine industries. Objectives are to increase efficiency of production while maintaining a lean, high quality, safe product; therefore, the research ultimately benefits the consumer as well as the production and agri-business sectors of animal agriculture. The research is directed toward problems of national concern and to meeting USDA's Action Agencies' research needs. Research approaches involve multidisciplinary teams with emphasis on both short-term and long-term solutions to improving animal production and product quality. About 50 percent of the effort is with beef cattle, 30 percent with swine, and 20 percent with sheep. The program is cooperative with the University of Nebraska and land-grant universities in the U.S.