NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Affymetrix today announced it will be the genotyping supplier for a project to develop 15 new rice varieties for small-scale farmers in Africa and Asia.
The Green Super Rice (GSR) project has selected the Santa Clara, California-based firm to supply genotyping microarrays for its molecular breeding activities. Affymetrix screened 2 million SNPs from the 3000 Rice Genomes Project to design an array specifically for the project, the Axiom GSR Rice Array. The new array will feature approximately 55,000 markers and will enable ultra-high-throughput processing and analysis of 384 samples at a time, the firm said in a statement.
"We selected the Axiom genotyping platform from Affymetrix due to the platform's capability to screen millions of markers and accurately transfer them to smaller 384HT format arrays," GSR project director Zhikang Li said in a statement. "Such precision and fidelity is not available on any other genotyping platform."
The GSR project is aiming to develop 15 new rice varieties in the next three years to help boost rice productivity. It is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chinese government and is coordinated by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
In July, Affymetrix announced a partnership with RUCDR Infinite Biologics to genotype samples from the National Institute of Drug Abuse using a custom array it designed with BioRealm.