NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Aperiomics has received a Phase 1B grant from the National Science Foundation's Small Business Innovation Research program to bring the company's current award total from the program to just under $180,000.
According to the grant abstract, Aperiomics intends to "develop, standardize and validate our metagenomics pathogen identification platform for use in agricultural detection and biosurveillance contexts, using aquaculture-related fish species and their infectious agents as a relevant application."
Specifically, the company will "characterize relative performance of sequencing platforms for pathogen identification; validate and benchmark our agricultural detection platform using fish samples and spike-ins diagnosed using established methods; and evaluate the use of host gene expression signatures as supporting evidence for infection," the abstract states.
Aperiomics plans to submit a Phase II grant proposal in the next funding cycle, the company said.
The Virginia-based bioinformatics services vendor offers a proprietary informatics pipeline for detecting pathogens in animal and human samples, which it uses to provide services to customers in markets such as animal screening, agricultural testing, and human diagnostics. The company officially launched its service last November at the annual meeting of the Association for Molecular Pathology. It offers three types of services: Absolute-ID, for detecting known pathogens; Absolute-Discovery for use in characterizing unknown or novel organisms; and Absolute-Biome for detecting and characterizing all microorganisms found in single sample.