St. Louis, Missouri
January 4, 2005
Orion Genomics, a
Second Code biotechnology company, announced today that it
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, and to contribute to the development of biofuels. A
paper authored by Orion researchers appears online today in
The Public Library of Science and describes the way in which
Orion’s GeneThresher™ technology was used to quickly and
cost effectively elucidate for the first time more than 95
percent 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 (http://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,” said
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. 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.
“Our hope is that Orion’s gift
of the sorghum sequence to public researchers brings
tremendous benefit to people worldwide by leading to
improved grain crops and environmentally friendly fuels,”
said Nathan Lakey, President and CEO of Orion Genomics.
Orion Genomics is a Second
Code™ biotechnology company developing oncology diagnostic
products and generating revenue in a hybrid
products-services model. Orion’s various proprietary
technologies, trademarked as GeneThresher, MethylScope, and
MethylScreen, detect both normal and abnormal epigenetic
patterns of genes and genomes and are used in various
agricultural biotechnology and molecular diagnostic
applications.
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